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The Pastor-Preacher. 



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The Pastor-Preacher. 


By 

WILLIAM A. gUAYLE, 

Bishop of the 

Methodist Episcopal Church. 


Kvpuy; iroifmcvei fxe, — David. 
Ego sum pastor bonus.— Jesus. 
TLi^pv^ov rov Xoyov. — Paul. 


Cincinnati : 

JENNINGS & GRAHAM. 

New York: 

EATON & MAINS. 













3\Ia^7.\\ 


Copyright, 1910, 
by Jennings and Graham. 


u. s. 


•'ansie, from 
So'd/«r-s Homa 
Ootas.iasj 


CONTENTS. 


The Preacher, - - - ... .9 

The Preacher as Annunciator, - - - 17 

The Pastor-Preacher,.22 

Redeeming the Time,.30 

The Tyranny of Books,.35 

The Preacher and His Books, - - - 43 

The Power of the Will in Preaching, - - 48 

The Range of Pulpit Themes, - - - 54 

Relation of the Pulpit to Civic Affairs, - 63 

Reaching the Rich and the Poor with the 
Gospel,.74 

The Secret of Effective Preaching—An At¬ 
tempt, -------- 82 

The Preacher and Sermonic Literature, - 91 

Trivialities of a Preacher’s Craft, - ^ 98 

Some Preacher “Nevers,” * • - 116 

The Sin of Being Uninteresting - - - 124 

The Pastor,.134 

The Pastor and the Sick, - - - - 142 

The Pastor and the Child, - - - - 149 

5 




CONTENTS. 


The Pastor and Youth,.162 

The Fine Art of Loving Folks, - - - 173 

“The Love of Christ Constraineth Us,” - 180 
“The Gift of Gob Which is in Thee,” - 185 

Keeping Alive the Sense of Wonder, - - 192 

Pollen for the Mind,.203 

The Search for Souls,.210 

The Preacher— A Mystic, - - - - 219 

The Prayer Before the Sermon, - - - 226 

The Justification of a Sermon, - - - 233 

The Preacher as an Appreciator, - - - 241 

The Preacher— A Man of Prayer, - - 255 

The Preacher and the Ages, - - - - 262 

The Poet and the Preacher, - - - 270 

Cicero and Paul— A Contrast, - - - 284 

The Debt of the Republic to the Preacher, 300 
Some Preachers I Have Known, - - - 324 

The Destination of a Sermon, - - - 354 

Preach-ing or Preach-er, . . . , 359 

Paul, the Preacher,.374 

“The Lord Is My Pastor,” - . . . 403 

Christ the Good Pastor, . - - . 408 


6 


A Foreword. 


Or my own accord I would not have been bold 
enough to write this book. To believe among the very 
many books on preachers and their affairs that one 
from me would not be an intrusion, was quite be¬ 
yond me. 

But the suggestion of our Book Editor, Dr. Cooke, 
supplemented by many ministers of many denomina¬ 
tions, has stimulated my courage to the point of set¬ 
ting down some things which as a pastor I have put 
to the test of practicability. 

If God will make these words of mine to minister 
to my brethren at God’s altar (my younger brethren 
in particular), I shall be elate; for with this sole in¬ 
tent has The Pastor-Preacher been written. 


William A. Quayle. 






The Preacher. 


Ip God or man has a manlier business than preach¬ 
ing, that business has not been set down in the list of 
masculine activities. Preaching is a robust business. 
It is in nothing ladylike, “If after the manner of 
men I have fought with the beasts of Ephesus” is not 
a phrase descriptive of physical or metaphysical lassi¬ 
tude or incapacity. The preacher is not a man of 
cartilage: he is a man of bone and sinew. He feels 
the riot of mighty deeds. Life is epic to him. “I bear 
in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus” was another 
of the granitic sayings of brother Paul, sometime 
preacher in the Church of God. 

And no man of the Christian ministry will find it 
possible to lack virility if he associates much with 
preacher Paul. Battle was a first notion with him; and 
battle is robust. The first degree, as the lodge-men say, 
in the gospel ministry is to feel that it is a man’s job. 

It takes more courage to be a preacher than to 
be a gladiator, or a stormer of fortresses, because the 
preacher’s battle is ever on, never ceases, and lacks 
the tonic of visible conquest. In the preacher busi¬ 
ness the sight of the eyes helps so little. Plaudits are 
lacking, huzzas are silent. The politician in campaign 
time may count on the torchlight procession, the explo¬ 
sion of cheers when the political platitude is uttered, the 
9 


THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


being carried on the shoulders of ardent political par¬ 
tisans who see in him the incarnation of their own 
political ideas. Nor is it to be doubted that these days 
of visible triumph bridge over those other days of an¬ 
tagonism and gibe to which the political leader is heir. 
One cheer resounds across many a day of muttered 
discontent. 

But a preacher has none of this. He is ever in 
the public eye, but never in the public plaudit. What¬ 
ever his service, urban, civic, patriotic, or literary, no 
acclaim greets him. His must be a life of clamorless 
renown. He feels the sullen antagonisms of unright¬ 
eousness and often hears its bitter and envenomed voice; 
but the procession of triumph belongs not to him nor 
to his hour, but please God to that far day when the 
humblest men and women shall have the crown and 
the plaudit at the hand and voice of God. This is 
no plea for the cheer, but is a tribute to the unac- 
clalmed man who marches straight on when every lip 
is dumb, hearing the voice of his Master saying “For¬ 
ward.” 

We shall not fill up the ranks of the ministry by 
talking smooth talk of ease or emolument. That is 
NOT HOW THE MATTER IS. The battle beats fiercely. 
It is against principality and powers, against spiritual 
wickedness in high places; it is tireless as the dread¬ 
ful fight before Port Arthur. The easy brother should 
not undertake this job. I call it “job” because that 
is what it is. Put preaching where it belongs, not 
with the so-called learned professions, but with the eter¬ 
nal working professions, the serious sweaty toils of men, 
10 


THE PREACHER. 


where the corn is planted and the wheat is reaped and 
the trenches are dug and the sewers laid—the ever¬ 
lasting labors of mankind. At this point “The Sky 
Pilot” and “Black Rock” have been worthy contribu¬ 
tions to the homiletics men ought to study who would 
adventure on the mighty manliness of preaching. Men 
who could play and pray and hit, and hit hard if 
need be; men who wore no collar to designate their 
craft, but went where they went with the throng of 
men, men with the throng—such can be sky pilots any¬ 
where. Music may or may not be in a preacher’s arm, 
but it must be in a preacher’s heart; and the manliest 
music in the human frame is always the tireless muscle 
of the heart, which refuses to rest lest all the other 
muscles die. 

The unaffrighted and the unaffrightable man, that 
is the figure of a preacher cast in bronze. How would 
a sculptor frame a preacher if he set him to that holy 
task.? If he wanted to picture sailor or architect, ar¬ 
tisan or inventor, it would require no vivid Imagination 
to picture forth some symbol of such deeds and such 
engagements; but a preacher, what would the sculptor 
do for him to make his meaning plain.? Were I sculp¬ 
tor I would frame a masculine figure meet to wrestle 
Hercules to the ground, and he should, level-eyed, look 
straight forward as to see the face of man and God, 
and have an uplifted mighty arm, on which should be 
caught a sword-stroke meant for a group which should 
huddle sheltered at his side, shielded by his arm from 
the crashing sword. The preacher is thus an arm to 
keep the helpless and unhelped from wrath of men, and 
11 


THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


the mighty from the blow of doom which falls on sin 
as from the roomy sky. That might or might not 
be a skillful scene to fling the preacher into lasting 
bronze, but would at least deliver him from the mil¬ 
linery of half-heartedness. He is a man, glad of the 
task, nor squeamish at the hurt, and is receiving sta¬ 
tion for all such vigors as inhabit this universe built 
of the brawny God. 

‘‘My son, be strong.” How athletically that word 
rasps on the air. The big man’s job is where we are 
to list the preachers at their place. The strong man’s 
vocation is what preaching is. They who want to do 
embroidery must not come here. The football men are 
the men wanted here. The center-rush men who heed 
not the opposing line, how hard it is to break, but 
break it—such men are the preacher type. I would 
have every candidate for the ministry play football. 
It would teach him impact and to see with quick eye 
the need, and with spirit and body agility to cope with 
the need. The great, bleak, angry line of sin, what 
shall a preacher do with that.?^ And the only logical 
reply as well as the only Scriptural reply is, “Rush 
against it.” Those who wait with suave deliberation 
to measure with a careful eye the forces massed against 
them will truly never be browbeaten by surly defeat, 
but they will as certainly never leap with the wild call 
of victory in throat and limb. Better to be beaten 
having tried than to be cowed and never to have tried 
at all. '"Grandly begin ” is the tremendous word of 
Lowell. And only such grandly begin as have nerve. 
Not the nerve of the braggart, not the nerve of sense- 
12 


THE PREACHER. 


less swagger, not the nerve of senseless attack, but the 
swift eye and the swift brain and the whirlwind attack 
—“And with God be the rest,” as the great Browning 
has it. 

To be wholesome, a preacher must be brawny. The 
anaemic of spirit can not do this deed. They had bet¬ 
ter not try. The world has definitely passed and for¬ 
ever passed out of the domain of the priest into the 
domain of the man. He who does not see that has 
little gift for seeing. The “nice man” is a past tense 
preacher-figure. Men want the strong man. It is not, 
to be sure, here intimated that the body is the preach¬ 
er’s chief asset. Slightness of figure hindered neither 
Wesley nor Napoleon. Not every man can have a six- 
foot figure like Washington, nor a six-foot-four figure 
like Abraham Lincoln. But the might of man lies not 
in his body. It lies in his soul, though it must be con¬ 
ceded that a brawny body which shall not subtract 
from the man when he is first met is worth the having. 
But the body must be as it is. We can not select the 
physical man we wear. But we may make the meta¬ 
physical man we ought to be. We be makers of our 
spiritual selves, God being our Helper. But spiritual 
brawn we may be and spiritual brawn we must be, pro¬ 
vided we are to do muscular service for the Lord Christ. 
Was it a happening that when Jesus sought disciples 
who should indoctrinate this world He beckoned to 
swarthy fisher folk and others of country soil, mostly 
country men and scarcely city men, and when He found 
a city man of singular and angular might He smote 
him with the cross and beckoned the bruised and fallen 
13 


THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 

city man to come and show how he could measure 
strength with country men; and afterwards this same 
city man from Tarsus said in justification of apostle- 
ship, “I thank God I labored more than they all?” The 
slight-built Saul was made of sinewy iron, who could 
take shipwrecks to his breast and bear scourgings and 
not die, and meet the robbers in the darkening hills. 
Filigree work instead of men will not do this country 
toil of preaching the country Christ. Marquetry and 
buhl are well enough, but are not world necessities. 
Paul was not by common conception a large man, but 
he was a man. Dr. Grenfell of the Labrador is a 
man of diminutive stature, but that man who is min¬ 
istering to such as needed the help of a Christ-man 
found himself on a wild night of the long Labrador 
winter afloat on a sagging sea of ice. The dogs which 
drew his wagon of the north grew ravenous with hunger 
and finally leaped on their master to dine off his flesh, 
and in self-defense he slew the brutes, battling as he 
clung to the houseboat of the tilting ice-cakes, skinned 
his slain dogs and wrapped him in their warm hides, 
and so escaped death by freezing, and, tying their legs, 
bone and bone, erected a flagstaff, from which waved 
the signal of his own garment, stripped from his freez¬ 
ing shoulders, and so signaled, a passing ship rescued 
him; and so the sea missed of one more victim and 
earth kept one hero a little longer. When I heard this 
man speak he impressed me as a little man. When 
I read this of him he stood before my imagination 
like a tower. Thomas Coke was a little man, but when 
verging toward seventy years, started out along the 
14 


THE PREACHER. 


then slow highway of the sea to become foreign mis¬ 
sionary to India, and died on the Indian Ocean, face 
toward those for whom his Christ in love had died. 
I love to front him and Livingstone in my thoughts— 
two lovers of the underworld of heathen loss and tears 
and hopelessness. 

Men like these are the strong men whom this ar¬ 
ticle has in view, such as shall lay man’s hand upon 
the mightiness we call this world. ‘‘If God be for us, 
who is he that can be against us.f’” is the hidden might 
on which the brawny preacher lays hold. He feels 
God competent and himself competent in God, nor 
leans much and has no kindredship to groaning, but 
sings much and shouts some and does sweaty deeds, 
which shall by and by become the substance of some 
iliad in heaven. 

Preachers, be strong. Roll your sleeves up to the 
shoulder. Make man know a brother man has come 
when you have invaded any place. A man is come, 
howbeit a Christ-man. A missionary in Porto Rico was 
preaching very late one night to a multitude. He was 
very weary. He had preached and administered the 
sacrament of the Lord’s Supper and married a grand¬ 
father and a son and a son’s son—^three generations— 
because in that land where pure Christianity had not 
been, marriage had been made so expensive that fam¬ 
ilies had been bom without the holy rite of wedlock; 
and now, when this missionary had come on this moon¬ 
lit night, son, father, grandfather had all been wedded 
to the women who were mothers of their children and 
had gone home happy that God had blessed them with 
15 



THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


marriage at the last. And the preacher-man, who had 
wrought far into the depths of the silver night, had 
taken hammock and gone apart to hang it on the hill¬ 
side, where moonlight gypsies with the shadows; and 
when his prayers were said and he would have slept, 
certain barefoot workingmen, who had come from far 
and had not heard enough of the strange, sweet gos¬ 
pel from the preacher’s lips, came quiet as the moon¬ 
light and said, “Mr. Christ-man, will you tell us some 
more about this Christ?” And then he said he knew 
he was not tired, but rested, and arose and told these 
workingmen, for whom Christ died, the story of the 
Christ, who was to them like some gracious dream— 
and they went down to their houses justified. “Mr. 
Christ-man,” that is nearly what a preacher is, though 
not quite; when these dusky brothers would come to 
know this preacher better, then they would acoost him 
as “Brother Christ-man.” And so this is what every 
preacher is—a man, a Christ-man, a brother Christ¬ 
man, strong to battle and to plow and reap, or, what 
is challenge to a stronger strength, to work and have 
no reaping—here. 


16 


The Preacher as Annunciator. 

A PREACHER may not be a great man, but he must 
preach great matters. His pronouncement is sublime. 
The little child who holds a geography in his hands 
holds a geography of a whole round world. He is a 
lad; but the geography is a planetary concern. Ini¬ 
tial to any dignified preachment, is the sense of its 
sheer immensity. To sail a toy boat on a puddle is 
quite a different employment from sailing a toy ship 
on an ocean. To some men preaching is sailing on a 
puddle. To such men, need it be said, preaching is 
a childish performance. A big man at a trivial task 
is ridiculous. Except a gospel be voluminous as an 
ocean, to preach is petty emplo^^ment. A stupendous 
gospel makes its proclamation a regal performance. 
Some kingdoms yet alive in our world are as infantile 
as the kingdom in “The Prisoner of Zenda,” only 
large enough to supply wine for a drunken king and 
cheap wardrobe for a kinglet. A little swagger, a 
little fuss and feathers, a little cheap theatricals, but 
no kingdom whose interests are the crowded interests 
of a mighty host. This is what renders the pomp of 
such workers ridiculous. They have all the ritual and 
none of the majesty of a cathedral. 

Here is where a man who inspects preaching as a 
possible vocation worthy of a grown man must be rigid 

2 17 


THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


with himself. He must scrutinize this task as a com¬ 
petent engineer does the swirls of riotous seas where 
a lighthouse is to be erected. The painstaking must 
be infinite. He must not lightly scan this home of 
wrecks like some gay pleasurer who lifts a voice of 
momentary horror over this feast of shipwrecks. These 
pass by this fearful spot: the engineer stays by it. 
He is here to cure it, and must therefore hold a court 
of inquiry over it. He calmly studies its wildest toss 
of wildest tempest. Even so the preacher in prospect. 
He is vigilant first of all to see whether the task be 
sublime. If it be not, he must not choose it for his 
human task. Either the gospel is incomparably great 
or it is imbecile; and no man must be doer of the im¬ 
becile. If this view be accurate, then it is apparent 
that the gospel differs from all vocations beside, for 
with other vocations some must be small, some large; 
and small must be cared for as definitely and sedu¬ 
lously as the large. Nothing that ought to be done 
is to be accounted small. Not so with the gospel. 
Either it is sublime or it is unworthy; and this is so 
because of the scene for which as well as the scene 
from which its task is defined and carried on. Either 
the gospel is a hoax or it is the great dignitary among 
the vocations of the world. It is mightiest or it is a 
piece of charlatanry; and what man dare think of him¬ 
self in the role of a charlatan! 

The lure of the gospel is the lure not of wages, 
not of leisure, not of prestige, but the lure of things 
to be done, which, if left undone, this world would be 
left a wreck along the shores of the universe. If the 
18 


THE PREACHER AS AtJNUNCIATOR. 


gospel be not utterly necessary it is utterly unneces¬ 
sary. There is no half-way permission or commission 
to this Christ apostolate. Man is so great and so lost 
in the theory of Jesus as to lift all that touches him 
into the supreme passion of the world. 

Unless a man feels this like the hack of a sword 
or the fierce jab of a spear, he must not preach. He 
is not big enough to preach to whom this gospel is 
not supremely great. Except a man’s ministry be mo¬ 
mentous, he himself is trivial. 

If a body kept a lighthouse on a bleak coast, shut 
up of storms and prisoner of dangers, could his man¬ 
ual toil ever become bitter or commonplace, if so be 
the keeper knew that on his fidelity to keep a lit lamp 
depended the safety of fleets of ships.? The days might 
be wintry, dark, monotonous, the coast might be one 
barren, dreary stretch of sand, the lighthouse might 
shiver to the waves’ onset crush on crush, the ice-floe 
might cinch round slow and ruthless, but these would 
only clamp his lips a little firmer for his resolute task, 
to keep brave ships safe from grim catastrophe. The 
value of his deed makes his whole life one epic achieve¬ 
ment. 

What think you, preacher, is your task sublime.? 
Does it summon a strange enthusiasm to dawn and 
noon like glorious Mount Tacoma of the Pacific Sea.? 
If not, then you have missed your task. Let go. You 
will with dull certainty fumble a task whose magni¬ 
tude you can not appreciate or approximate. Men so 
little as to think the gospel lean must not undertake 
to preach it. Wise men will laugh at them: the wise 
19 


THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


God is certain to. Better mend kettles in a jail than 
to think a Pilgrim’s Progress a foolish quest and think 
the Delectable Mountains inconsequential hills. If the 
gospel brings a man to his knees, if the Christ seems 
loftier than all the lit stars, if Jesus seems beyond all 
words yet theme of all words in time and in eternity, 
if a lost world shut the soul in as with a Labrador fog, 
and the sense of a redeemed world wakes a million sun¬ 
rises on the morning hills of the heart, then may that 
man humbly aspire to be minister in holy things, a ne¬ 
ophyte at God’s high altar. 

The relevant question for any preacher to raise at 
this inquisition of his own soul is never, “Am I great 
but ever, “Is the gospel great?” 

“The task as under the great Taskmaster’s eyes,” 
as the blind Milton hath it, is the eventual thing, the 
solemn and solemnizing circumstance of a ministerial 
career. “I am the proclaimer of this gospel,” is a 
preacher’s authorization of himself. 

Suppose at the gate of a city, as a preacher en¬ 
tered the portal for the first time, there stood as in 
ancient cities a sentinel with strident voice to lift the 
challenge, “Who goes there?” Then the preacher’s 
fearless answer to the fearful challenge would be, “I 
am a preacher of the everlasting gospel.” And the 
sentinel will let him pass. In these wide words he has 
lifted above his head a sky where all sublimities and 
humilities may wander fearless as the rush of stars. 

I have seen some men preaching who appeared to 
me to be clerks in a poor store. They were very busy; 
but they had no goods. They sifted the newspapers 
20 


THE PREACHER AS ANNUNCIATOR. 


to disclose a Sunday theme. They were eager with a 
sort of childish eagerness to have something to say, 
but when they spoke they had nothing to say which, 
if left unsaid, had left a new heart-break in the world. 
Newspapers deal in temporalities: a sermon, to be a 
preachment, deals in sempiternalities (a latinity which, 
if used seldom, reverberates like a terrific sea). 

“If I left this sermon unsaid, what loss would en¬ 
sue?” Put that sharp sword at every sermon’s throat 
and see how the sermon fares. “The gospel is so sub¬ 
lime,” is how the mighty preachers felt. That was the 
mood of Paul, who was burdened by his vast preach¬ 
ment. “I have a baptism to be baptized with,” said 
the Christ. That sense of vocation will crush little 
moods down, will stay manliness up, will give valor as 
a warrior, will give charm as a man, will give a man 
a hearing on the part of brawny and burdened souls. 

“It must be told,” is how a man must feel toward 
this gospel. It must be told. This world needs it. 
This world must have it. “I am the voice,” said sun¬ 
burnt John. “I am the voice,” every preacher must 
say. What boots it that gracious truths are for the 
telling if no one lifts the voice for telling them? I 
am that voice. I must not be silent. “Woe is me if 
I preach not this gospel,” is the sedate answer of a 
serious soul confronted by the peril of silence. “I must, 
I must; I dare not be silent.” And when viewed in 
this light, preaching becomes sublime. 


21 


The Pastor-Preacher. 

Fali^acies lurk almost everywhere. They are very 
treacherous. Who does not guard against their guile 
will probably be slain by them in the dark. This 
preacher-task is peculiarly liable to this wily attack. 
The fallacy of special prevalence is that a man must 
content himself to be a preacher or a pastor: he can 
not be both. This is often said, and often, too, by 
such as should know better. In no vocation is a fal¬ 
lacy quite so treacherous and damaging as in the 
preacher vocation. There incorrect premises will mis¬ 
lead, if they do not ruin, a career. Many look on the 
activity of a minister as if he were to be either an 
assistant pastor or to have an assistant pastor. Such 
expectancy is plainly deceptive. It neither will be that 
way, nor ought it to be. A man should be big enough 
for both procedures, and can be that big. It is his 
distinct business to be. Not infrequently advices to 
ministers are tendered by such as could not preach or 
could not visit, and sometimes could do neither, and 
then these visible infallibilities stand qualified to criti¬ 
cise all who in weakness and weariness and yet with 
manly fidelity are trying to do both. The axiom of 
a preacher’s career should be, “By the help of the 
great Pastor of the flock, I will be a pastor-preacher.” 

22 


THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


The supposition that a man is so important that he 
can not afford time to make pastoral calls is a piece of 
irreligious conceit which is intolerable in a man who 
is to be a servant of all. What ought to be done, that 
is the business of the preacher to do, and to do gladly. 
A sign to all men who are to engage in this preacher 
trade with all its exaltations and all its heart-weariness 
is that the greatest of human preachers, Paul of name, 
visited from house to house and did so betimes with 
tears blinding his Christ-dimmed eyes. After that en- 
sample we lesser men may well refrain from suggesting 
to ourselves that we are too important to do the menial 
service of pastoral visitation. 

The trouble is largely with our ideal. If a man 
gets off on the wrong foot in this business he seldom 
gets on the right foot. If a man entering the min¬ 
istry feels called of God to do all that becometh a good 
minister of Jesus Christ, and feels that this includes 
caring for the flock, hunting the straying sheep, catch¬ 
ing the lost lamb against his heart, binding up the 
broken-hearted, caring with great gentleness, yet with 
stern sagacity, for those who are out of the way, then 
will his whole life shape itself to meet this gracious 
conception of heavenly ministry. I have not met any 
minister who had once been a visitor from house to 
house amongst his people, giving over the custom, on 
further knowledge of that way, because of inexpediency. 
Those who once try ‘‘calling” as a means of grace both 
for themselves and their parishioners, see the sweet 
effectiveness of this ministry and use it with growing 
eagerness as the years go on. True, it is hard work 
23 


THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


to go day after day from house to house. The body 
wearies and the soul wearies. But why should a serv¬ 
ant complain at being tired? Is not he his Master’s 
man? Do not his work hours belong to his employer? 
Is it to be wondered at or complained of that at day 
end his shoulders stoop beneath the toil? Truly not. 
Every hired man, if he have done a man’s work that 
day, is tired by night time; and his weariness is token 
of his diligence. 

But the ideal, and not the physical toil I still think 
is the chief deterrent to the exercise of this godly dili¬ 
gence in pastoring the flock. Can a man do both pas¬ 
toral and preaching work effectively? Certainly. And 
why speak so dogmatically on a disputed point? Be¬ 
cause many ministers have done both. This ends the 
matter. What has been done can be done. An able- 
bodied and an able-souled man can do great things; 
and when definite things need the doing we are the 
men to do them. No thoughtful man can doubt the 
effectiveness of pastoral work. All human people want 
to be cared for by their pastor. To assume that one 
has members who do not care whether he comes to see 
them or not, is to assume that they lack the human 
heart. They do not. There are no classes and no 
masses to a wise man who cares for souls. He knows 
folks. And if a man be so, he will find open doors 
and open hearts; and if he be not so, then he has no 
business in the holy vocation of preaching. “I am suf¬ 
ficient of a preacher not to need to visit around,” I 
have heard that remark not infrequently, and have 
heard of it frequently. It is always a mark which evi- 
24 


THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


dences a sure lack of the very brain-girth which the 
speaker credits himself with possessing. If a man is 
really big he can do two things. If he can not do 
the two things, he is small. A little conceited strut¬ 
ting will not raise him into real intellectual supremacy. 
So far from a preacher divorcing himself from pas¬ 
toral fidelity because he can gather a hearing by his 
voice and heart making joint argument, he is the more 
obligated to bring his powers of holy persuasion to 
bear on the unit, and not let his sole influence lie on 
the one altar of public speech. 

Either a man is too big to make pastoral calls or 
he is too little. The man who makes his boast that 
he does not need to make pastoral visits plainly does 
not think himself little. He mistakes himself for a 
great man. Now, if he were great he could be ambi¬ 
dexter and do both. The fallacy at this point, I take 
it, lies just here: A minister thinks that such ministers 
as go from house to house to visit are drumming up 
a congregation, but that they themselves are so gifted 
as not to need to drum up a crowd. But the falsity of 
the assumption lies in the motive implied. The faith¬ 
ful minister is not drumming up a crowd as he goes 
from door to door, knowing the children, comforting 
the wounded; he is doing his duty, he is getting close 
to those whose servant he is, he is showing by his com¬ 
ing that here is a friend, a brother, a lover. If by 
this means his hearing is augmented, so much the bet¬ 
ter; but with a man of real depth of spiritual nature 
that does not occur to him at all, and most certainly 
does not occur to him as the motive of his endeavor. 
25 


THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


He IS girded for his deed by the high hope of helping 
those to whom he comes. 

I am not unaware that it has been thought that, 
irrespective of real preaching gift, a good visiting- 
pastor could build up a notable hearing. My impres¬ 
sion formed by years of attention to leading leaders 
in the Church of Christ is that, however this may have 
been in times past, it is not so now. A good pastor 
may be preferred to a man who is solely a good 
preacher; but the good pastor needs to preach; and 
the good preacher needs to be a good pastor. People 
are getting curious. They seem to want a man to be 
capable of ministering to them by high speech, by 
the touch of hand and the whisper of the voice. 

Some think that visiting is easy work, that it is 
mainly an exercise of the legs. What a poor sense 
such have of the validity of the social instinct and the 
divine instinct of the home! Those who so think do 
themselves scant credit. It is hard to muster up real 
respect for that man who knows people and respects 
the souls of women and men and yet has so scant an 
appreciation of meeting man as man apart where two 
souls may hazard confidences. It is a burning pity 
that in these so profound interests men can exhibit so 
feeble perception. True, a man may be so gifted as 
a preacher that, whether he visits or not, he can com¬ 
mand a hearing and can help a throng, which is quite 
beside the real issue. The real issue is not whether a 
speaker can by the remote handling of the pulpit ben¬ 
efit many and gather a distinguished congregation, but 
is whether he could not do any given congregation more 
26 


THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


good by both remote and neighborly treatment. Ab¬ 
sent treatment may well excite the risibilities of such 
as are not opaque in their intelligence, and it may with 
cogency be required by every preacher of himself 
whether absent treatment in a social and brotherly 
way can by any possibility so help those whom he is 
bound in righteousness to help as present treatment 
would do. 

Pastoral visiting I deem to be a greater tax on the 
faculties than preaching, hard as preaching is. Such 
visiting is by no manner of means a holiday to the 
brain. Provided a preacher spent his forenoon in his 
study in taxing thought and profound investigation of 
those majestic themes which every preacher is called 
on by his vocation to consider, even then weighing the 
serious intellectual intent of the morning hours, with 
due regard to their intensity, the afternoon, if spent 
in going from house to house as a cure of souls, is 
a severer intellectual task. Every faculty of soul, 
body, brain, spirit is brought into play when a preacher 
becomes a shepherd of souls. Those who lightly esteem 
this section of a preacher’s effort have not given heed 
to this. Had they wrought in the vineyard of pastor- 
toil they would have been too smart to have vended a 
cheap and empty sneer. If a minister does not him¬ 
self do his duty and go from house to house in the 
name of God, welcoming the stranger, making the sick 
forget their aches and the lonely their tears, let him 
at least have the courtesy to let those men alone who 
will do what they should do. 

He who visits his flock must be prayerful, alert, 

27 


THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


thoughtful, robust, humorous, a lover of children, and 
a deep lover of age, a stout lover of youth and an 
eager lover of such as are in the very energy of great 
action, with the sweat dripping from the face and 
no leisure to wipe the dripping sweat away. He must 
be aware of men. Some preachers think they should 
beware of men and women. That is their blunder. 
Being aware of souls is the sweet essential which will 
give a preacher passport to most lives. “A searcher 
for souls” is what a preacher en route to homes may 
be denominated. And could anybody wish a diviner 
cognomen ? 

But the novice will naturally inquire, “If I go 
calling so much, when will I get time to prepare my 
sermons The question is valid, but not discerning. 
He must preach and he ought to preach capable ser¬ 
mons, by which is meant sermons freighted with intent 
and thought and aspiration and the fine fire of warming 
the cold heart. But pastoral calling will aid, not re¬ 
tard, this very sermon preparation. No average man 
can bend the full force of well-trained faculties to 
study more than six consecutive hours without intel¬ 
lectual fag. If he spend more time, if an apt student 
of himself, he is aware that he binds a certain hazi¬ 
ness of atmosphere around all the objects of his 
thought. To study well while in the study, and to visit 
well when out of the study, are reciprocals. They do 
not, like trains trying to run on one track in opposite 
directions, collide; but, like trains on the same track 
going in like directions, they carry double commerce. 
The distinct blame of most study habits is that there 
28 


THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


is a dissipation of force, because the entire attention 
is not held to the matter in hand. The student reads 
twice what he should have read but once, and the twice 
reading was necessitated by not giving absolute heed 
at the first reading. A rigid disciplinarian of his fac¬ 
ulties will not allow his mind to wool-gather, but de¬ 
mands of it in imperious fashion that it tend to busi¬ 
ness in business hours. 

Now, assuming that a student has poured out his 
mind after this fashion for six hours, or five hours, or 
even four hours, he will discover that a change of oc¬ 
cupation will freshen his jaded faculties and bring him 
back like a man coming home from a swim in the sea— 
full of vigor as if he had never been tired. No man 
will, in my opinion, lose in his intellectual life, and 
no man will lose in his preacher effectiveness by spend¬ 
ing his afternoons calling on his members. 

. Certainly every manly preacher will recognize that 
he must study. He has no right to take wages for a 
given thing and then not do that thing. ‘‘Study” 
may serve as a preacher motto for a part of a preach¬ 
er’s toil. But for another part of that toil the motto 
is, “VISIT;” and the two will clasp hands as cordially 
as spring and summer. 

No man can be too busy to visit. No man can be 
so direful a student as to honestly have no leisure for 
seeing his members at their homes. When I hear a 
man talking that way I set him down as unconscious 
or conscious stage-play. He is possibly fooling his 
brains with his mouth. 


29 


“Redeeming the Time.” 


The pastor has all the time there is, for which 
reason he has no cause to complain. He has enough 
time—let us put it that way. And many a preacher 
will demur. In a way he has a right to, but in an¬ 
other way he has neither right to nor cause to. We 
have all more time than we use. We have not need 
so much of more time, but need of redeeming the time 
we do possess. ‘‘Value time; for it is the stuff of life,” 
said wise Ben Franklin, which is a more recent put¬ 
ting of a laconic and perspicuous saying from the lips 
of a man who was a real master in the art of using 
time, preacher Paul, who said “redeeming the time.” 

The preacher says, “I am busy every waking mo¬ 
ment.” Likely enough. That is the trouble. “Busy” 
people are fussy people. They lack calm. They per¬ 
turb themselves and others. A saying of John Wesley 
has always impressed me as the wisest word I have ever 
heard touching the use of time. That sagacious work¬ 
ingman observed, “I am always in haste, but never in 
a hurry.” That is as acute as the cryptic sayings of 
Bacon in his essays. Hurrying wastes time: haste uses 
time. To be fussy does nothing much except to make 
a bluster like as the passage of a speeding train brings 
in behind it a track of leaves and winds and papers, 
which rush frantically into the vacuum the train has 
30 


REDEEMING THE TIME. 


made. There is plenty of hurry, but no locomotion; 
a bluster of dust, detached, useless, nervous—that is 
all. I have known preachers who made you wild: they 
were in a tempest, rather a teapotty tempest, to be sure, 
but still a tempest. The world was riding them as if 
they had been a nag. When they came and where they 
were there were dust and scattering among children. 
Church members, and Church matters. They mistook 
sputter for proceeding. They simply slew the effective 
procedure of themselves by their dusty bluster. They 
worried around; they told everybody how busy they 
were; they could hold you any length of time, detail¬ 
ing how unmercifully they were pressed with work, and 
fooled away (that is the exact phrase to fit the exact 
fact) enough time talking about their work to have 
done it. They simply mistook sputter for speed and 
execution. Work is done in calm just as boats which 
build the breakwater on windy seas must have calm for 
the prosecution of their industry; so must a preacher. 
He can not bully a sermon nor bluster his way through 
serious labors. He can command a calm. Hurry is 
detrimental to expedition in accomplishment; Nature is 
skilled artisan in despatching business. So hurry kicks 
up a dust: haste makes no dust, so there is time to see 
what it is at. Or, to change the comparison, haste, 
like an auto, keeps ahead of its own dust. If the 
preacher would be pacific, but speedy, he will be amazed 
by the amount he can accomplish. Friction is lost force. 
Thus must the preacher avoid friction. 

He knows that the longevity of life is not in his 
own hands. He must live while he may, and die when 
31 


THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 

he must. But there is a thing y^hich can be compelled. 
Whether one may add years to one’s life, he may, by 
increasing the speed of execution, add a number of 
lifetimes to his life. If a body increase the speed of 
doing things—^thinking, reading, and the like—by 
twice, then in fifty years he will live a hundred years; 
if three times, then in fifty years he will have lived 
a hundred fifty years; if by six times, which is quite 
within the possibility, then in fifty years he would live 
three hundred years. Here is where haste tells. This 
is the philosophy of John Wesley having done such 
a surprising amount of work. He was not in a hurry; 
but was always in haste; and he accomplished. He 
had put his faculties on the dead run, which is the 
easier speed for the brain, as for the auto, than low 
speed. Every preacher should therefore put his mind 
to speed. He should read not lazily, not stupidly, but 
alertly. The brain ought to be taught to attend to 
business; for it is really lazy, like a man born in the 
tropics, and will not haste unless driven to it. But a 
man should master his faculties. He is their lord. 
They can do and they will do with precision and ex¬ 
pedition if held to it, and a logy brain can be trained 
to alacrity and fidelity if never allowed to loiter nor 
dally at a task. Never allow yourself to read a page 
twice to get the thought. When that is done it is not 
because the thought is so profound, but because the at¬ 
tention of the reader is so lax. The mind is more in¬ 
stantaneous than the eye, and yet the eye is practically 
instantaneous. When a surgeon takes his surgical in¬ 
struments in his hand, then the hand becomes calm like 
32 


REDEEMING THE TIME. 


steel. The hand is trained to answer to the demand of 
the surgeon’s knife. What an apt illustration of what 
the mind may be trained to do so soon as any subject 
is put before it for elaboration. Nor is this theory. 
This is the way the mind is. It will submit itself to 
its master. It will go, and it will go like a whipped 
horse if so disciplined. 

So shall the average man amongst us prolong his 
life of accomplishment from one hundred to two hun¬ 
dred years. It is distinctly worth while to make the 
effort, the goal being so worthy. 

We shall be able to read many books and ponder 
them. The more haste the less speed, is not true. The 
more hurry the less speed: the more haste the more 
speed. To be a skilled intellectual craftsman is to be 
qualified for speed and for accuracy. 

Time is often wasted in dawdling over small things. 
The average correspondence which the average preacher 
has to attend to is slight. Yet many a preacher will 
let an entire morning evaporate while he is dawdling 
around replying to three or four letters. If that is 
not fooling away time, pray, what is it? Or he goes 
down town on an errand two or three times a day 
when once was plenty. All he had to do he could have 
done at one going. He did not use his brain to plan 
the errands down town. 

Then often the preacher takes himself so seriously. 
He stands off and looks at his work, and it looks big. 
Surely. But if, instead, he would buckle into his work, 
the task would grow smaller. A cord of wood will 
last interminably if the man who is to cut it into stove- 
8 33 


THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


wood looks at it and estimates how many sticks there are 
in the cord of wood; but if he will take the first stick, 
put it on the buck, and saw fast, the cord will melt 
away and he will have fun by seeing it melt away. 
To stand off and discourse on the size of the job is 
not the expeditious way of doing the job. “Pitch into 
it,” is the colloquial and terse and altogether sweaty 
way of putting it, but is the right way. That does 
things. 

Instead of bemoaning paucity of time, let him re¬ 
deem time. Let him urge his faculties to celerity. Let 
him omit the small things and do the large things. Let 
him be alert and take intellectual crosscuts, and the 
average preacher will be delighted to see his own prog¬ 
ress. When he walks to make calls let him walk at a 
good gait. When he grows muggy in his brain, let 
him quit study and go out and face the sky, and do 
something which shall enliven his wits, and he will 
come back to the old issue with a live intelligence and 
delight himself with finding how instantly without ef¬ 
fort is it put to his hand. 

What some men have done may teach all of us what 
redemption of time, what elongation of time in output 
is possible to such as “occupy” till Christ comes. To 
gauge our work and its comparative excellence not by 
how long we were, but by what is the actual market 
value of the work, will redeem many a man from daw¬ 
dling and bring him to surprising outputs for him. 

Lord, teach us how to redeem Thy time and ours. 
Amen. 


84 


The Tyranny of Books. 

Now, for a preacher to use a book is legitimate; 
but for a book to use a preacher is illegitimate. If a 
congregation can discover by a preacher’s Sunday ut¬ 
terances where the preacher’s week-day reading has 
been, then is that preacher in sore need of ampli¬ 
fying. A preacher’s entire life of reading (in so far 
as a book may) should minister to each Sunday’s ut¬ 
terance, and not some book on which he has browsed 
during the week. I know a preacher whose preachments 
Sunday after Sunday will counteract each other with 
as much fidelity as the sentiments in some of Emerson’s 
essays. The reason was apparent. He was a cheap 
man and belonged to the book of the hour. Books of 
the hour are petulant. Especially if a man reads the¬ 
ology (calling each tome theological which avers itself 
to be theological) he will find himself conducting a 
menagerie with many anomalous beasts in his tents, but 
the names of them he does not know. 

The bookish preacher is defective because people 
are more than books; and when a man can not digest 
books and brings them into the pulpit as if he brought 
them in his hand, he becomes a ditto mark with many 
another preacher. His sermon is not his. It has a 
tang of a school. He has gotten it by heart, but his 
35 


THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


heart has not got it. The sea drinks all rivers which 
crowd from mountain levels to the sea sands; but all 
rivers become sea when once the mighty thirst of the 
ocean has engulfed them. So the reading of many 
books is in keeping with the preacher’s manliness and 
ministry if all he reads he appropriates as the sea, and 
gives his multi-information the color of his personality 
and thought as the sky may give its color to the sea. 

The reason why so many ignorant preachers are 
more interesting than many cultured preachers is that 
the ignorant man has not been mutilated and mastered, 
but comes such as he is fresh from the fields, with his 
own force backed up by his own personality, saying 
the thing he thinks. There is in him a freshness like 
the dewy fields, and strength like the rocks which apply 
their massiveness to constructing mountains, and are a 
surprise like the finding of a new wild flower. When 
books master a preacher they are his foes: when the 
preacher masters books they are his good friends. 

Some rules for a preacher’s reading may be here 
hazarded: 

1. Read many books. 

2. Do not read in one direction for a month or 
two months, but in many directions all the time, pref¬ 
erably every day. 

S. To this end keep on the mental table several 
diverse topics—fiction, poetry, prose literature, his¬ 
tory, science, music, philosophy, discovery, biography. 
So many read one thing for months till they are fairly 
covered with the mold of their effort like stale bread. 
So many times, on asking a preacher, “What have you 
36 


THE TYRANNY OF BOOKS. 


been reading lately?” he will reply, sociology, history, 
theology, or what not; but seldom more than one direc¬ 
tion. Thought inclines too readily to become reiterant 
and needs to be schooled to be versatile. 

4. Such reading will help the mind to keep clear 
thought. One book will rest the mind for the other 
book and from the other book, just as looking in dif¬ 
ferent directions of the landscape will keep the sight 
more accurate than looking down one road for long, in 
which case you can scarcely discern at all. 

5. This democracy of reading will keep alive the 
sense of delight in all. Tedium is avoided. Every 
prospect pleases. Suppose a student to do a thing like 
this: read at the same time Cicero’s Letters, William 
Cowper’s Letters, James Smetham’s Letters. The dif¬ 
ference in times, the difference in minds, the difference 
in personalities, the difference in occupations will give 
the right of way to many noble vistas of thought. Or 
suppose he reads Amiel’s journal, Rousseau’s Confes¬ 
sions, Asbury’s Journal, John Wesley’s Journal, John 
Woolman’s Journal, and Boswell’s Johnson simultane¬ 
ously. Or suppose, again, he reads The Life of Phil¬ 
lips Brooks, The Life of Huxley, The Life of Charles 
Darwin, the Autobiography of Herbert Spencer, Rus- 
kin’s Praeterita, and Cardinal Newman’s ‘‘Apologia pro 
Sua Vita.” While these readings are in the same gen¬ 
eral direction, they open up such diverse intellectual 
and spiritual atmospheres as to prove immensely accel¬ 
erative to thought and stimulative to the moral need. 
Or suppose he reads the Life of Lowell and the Let¬ 
ters of Lowell, Carlyle’s Cromwell, Emily Dickinson’s 

37 


THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


Poems, Thoreau’s Cape Cod, and John Wesley’s Ser¬ 
mons at the same time. What planets would swim into 
his ken, and how readily he might find his thoughts 
speaking the language of the great spirits of the world! 

6. Read fiction. It will keep the blood hot and 
the eyes keen, and will teach the art of seeing charac¬ 
ters as those masters in character saw them. “Loui- 
sana” will hearten a man for months, and “The Manx¬ 
man” will set a hero in the soul, and “Quentin Dur- 
ward” will make the day of his advent seem a modern 
incident, and “Robinson Crusoe” will make him rollick 
like a boy, and “Treasure Island” will kindle all the 
boy there ever was in him, as will also Irving Bacheller’s 
“The Master.” It will set a man having nightmares 
over Rog Rohn; and Hawthorne will always keep the 
spirit listening for and hearing things he could not 
hear without, and “Under the Greenwood Tree” will 
make the country dewfall gather on the ground of a 
body’s soul; and “Eben Holden” will set a man’s heart 
to the tune of kindliness for a hundred years. 

7. The preacher’s theological reading, so called, 
will need to be, in honor, more or less in the channels 
of his Church belief. If not so, it will be hard to jus¬ 
tify his patriotism toward his own denomination. A 
wild rush to read every new theological volume (so- 
called) because it talks authoritatively of religion, is je¬ 
june. The wiser minds take such in homeopathic por¬ 
tions. A little is adequate. To be sure, a preacher 
must not be hidebound and must read a few theological 
works each year, said theological works to be in such 
diverse directions as to cover the thinking in the theo- 

38 


THE TYRANNY OF BOOKS. 


logical field. But care must be used lest he fritter 
away much time which might be better used. 

8. In buying books, as in reading them, the 
preacher should study each year to keep himself so 
alive to the book market that he can select some vol¬ 
ume in the various domains of science which shall keep 
him abreast with the best thought, namely, the truest 
thought, and most sagacious and informed in these 
fields. Cyclopedias for advancing science are abso¬ 
lutely worthless, but by the method above mentioned 
every crowded preacher can keep himself abreast of 
the best scientific as well as theological thinking of his 
time. 

Now, in all this a man must guard himself with all 
diligence lest the erosion of books wear his selfhood 
away. Many speak the speech as it was pronounced 
to them and trippingly on the tongue. I no sooner 
hear them a few minutes than I know what to expect, 
nor am I surprised or disappointed. I always hear it. 
The usual saying, “That was a strong address,” is 
usually true. So it was. But it belonged not to the 
man who emitted it, but to his master, whether man or 
book. I had read the address in the book before I 
heard the address from the man. The utterance had 
no more personality and originality than the shadow of 
a boulder cast in a stream. To the many who were 
not informed in reading, the address passed for strong 
thought: to one informed it passes as an absorption of 
books, an address in which was no sign of thought. The 
things he told were told him; and as they were told, 
so he spoke. The reduction of a man’s personality to 
39 


THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


a ditto mark, that is bookish preaching. I know a 
preacher who never is guilty of a thought for himself, 
and yet he thinks himself a peculiarly original and 
somewhat brilliant thinker. But he is really a sponge. 
He puts his brain in water, and then squeezes the brain. 
I have experimented on him by suggesting a thought 
on some week day, and with astonishing fluency he on 
the following Sunday would emit that thought. Had 
anybody accused this ditto brother of being pure plag¬ 
iarist he would have become mephitic. He is so huge 
a ditto mark as not to know it, but will vex the ear 
with thoughts which quite consume him, and he thinks 
himself doing the labors of Hercules when he really 
is doing the labors of nobody. This kind of a brother 
is very tedious, but often passes for scholarly. “Schol¬ 
arly” is a nondescript word in vogue by many to 
cover up their own paucity of thought and lack of 
ability to do a thing they were not coached to do. 

Pastoral visiting will frequently do more to break 
the tyranny of books than all other things combined. 
A flow of hot blood, an invasion of soul, the cry for 
help oozing from bleeding lips, will make a lot of book¬ 
ishness become humanness. Preachers are dealers with 
souls. Men, women, children are more majestic than 
books. Books may cast a light on the soul and on 
soul forces as an artist conceals the light from the 
gaze of the spectator, but so placed that his picture 
is set out with splendor by the hidden lamp. So used, 
books are priceless in their soul use. 

Books must filter through the soil of personality as 
water through the earth’s gravels which are about 
40 


THE TYRANNY OF BOOKS. 


them. Most water of celebrated springs owes its quali¬ 
ties to the earths which hold it. Preachers must study 
this,—study that books do not eliminate them as Becky 
Sharp eliminated Rawdon Crawley. Sermons should 
not smell of the book, nor smell of the lamp, but should 
thrill with the thrill of the book and the thrill of the 
man who preached the sermon, so that all the auditors 
may say, “Our preacher spoke this daywhereas many 
an auditor must in fidelity to fact say, “Our preacher 
to-day rehearsed another installment of thoughts be¬ 
longing to somebody else.” 

Books are the preacher’s good servitors, but his ex¬ 
ecrable masters. The preacher needs to have an insur¬ 
rection of himself. If on a given day any visitor 
should inquire in some pulpit, “Who preached here.?^” a 
just reply would be, “’Most anybody preaches here; 
but Brother Ditto is the mouthpiece; we have phono¬ 
graphic observations from this pulpit.” This stricture 
would not be cynical, but it would be vitriolic. A 
preacher should refuse to be such that this criticism 
may be passed upon him. When asked who he is he 
should be able to reply, “I am not the voice of books, 
but books speak through my voice what I pray God 
may be an inspiration.” 

The sin of contemporaneous preaching is not that 
it is not homiletical, but that it is what might be said 
by anybody who had read the same books. 

Squelched by the books—is what many are. They 
are bedridden by the books which are really meant to 
be stimulative to their own thinkings. When a body 
recalls the discourses he has heard it is humiliating to 
41 


THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


consider how few persons spoke as if they themselves 
had had the vision. So that the thing to consider with 
the preacher’s own self in the reading of many books, 
which reading he ought not to omit, is that his primary 
business, intellectually stated, is not to find out what 
everybody else thinks about his text, nor how many 
books have been written on the text, but what does he 
himself squeeze from the text, and how he on his own 
road can come to destinations which will be helpful to 
men’s souls. Not what the commentaries say, but what 
does he himself have to say. 

If the preacher holds books in solution in his brain 
so that he is not himself a book in a different binding, 
but that books enter into his vitalities and on any day 
can burgeon in him with a hidden gladness, then is 
a preacher safe with his books; but if they tyrannize 
over him like some children do over their fathers, then 
will the book be a millstone hanged about his neck. 
And what may happen to a man with such neckgear is 
common knowledge. 


42 


The Preacher and His Books. 

“I AM a book man,” said Lowell; and every preacher 
should profess this Lowell creed. Books are the juices 
squeezed from the cluster of the ages. They represent 
earth’s wisdom and delight and are the foot-path across 
the hills along which the generations have trod. The 
preacher ought to be at home in the best thought of 
all time. He owes that to himself; he owes that to his 
people. He has no call to slight any help coming 
from any source. It is witful for a man to be familiar 
with the sagacities of human genius. He should know 
the values of which the human spirit is capable. His 
lips should be attuned to all choicest phrases and all 
unusual thoughts. His tongue should be put to school 
to noble English from Chaucer to Maurice Hewlett. 
The training of his tongue is a thing he must attend 
to, for he is a talker of things. Storrs and Beecher 
and Parker may affirm what music is possible to extem¬ 
poraneous utterance. 

The preacher should read the dictionary. The book 
is rather long, it must be admitted, but is beyond de¬ 
gree fascinating. He will do well to mark every word 
in the lexicon save the chemical terms, which may be 
dropped off sight unseen and good riddance. The 
amount of romance packed up in the history of a single 
word will stand a dullard’s brain on tip-toe. This die- 
43 


THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


tionary perusal will give the speaker a gamut of speech 
which will keep him from being his own ditto mark. 
The words he uses will be like the flowers a body might 
pluck coming through a wild-flower field. A word has 
a haunting quality in it betimes like a strain of sad¬ 
dened music heard at dusk. Three or four pages of 
the dictionary each day will stir many a dead coal into 
flame and stir intelligence into a vagrant mood; and 
vagrant moods are the soul’s hours of vision and at¬ 
tempt. 

As seems to this writer, the preacher’s reading 
should be for the purpose of girding his intellect. He 
must be a man and acclimated to the thoughts men 
have thought and the hill road men have walked with 
naked feet. He should bring knowledge from far. He 
should be on the search for facts as facts, and not as 
illustrations for sermons. This is a mean thing to 
do—never to forget your job, but every day to be 
eagle-eyed to find the thing to fit your need. A touch 
of manly generosity will lift a man above all this. To 
get words for words’ sake, beauty for beauty’s sake, 
landscape for the sake of landscape, that is the manly 
thing for a preacher to do. 

To bring the message big with meaning to human 
souls—those sights of your eyes, those yesterdays with 
men and things and books, those memorabilia of for¬ 
gotten words, those saddened faces from the lives of 
men mad with the fray or smitten with the flail of 
pain, should leap to your need like sword-hilt to hand, 
and you will feel not as a trespasser, but as a dis¬ 
coverer. 


44 


THE PREACHER AND HIS BOOKS. 


To read books for the love of books, to study his¬ 
tory as being one of the race whose varied journeys 
history records, and for the reason that you are a man 
whose hands shape history, in the last, to the fine ex¬ 
pression of his own soul, to read poetry because poets 
hear the swish of those waves whose voices to their 
hearing become articulate words, to read fiction because 
it is one of the brawniest ways of telling truth, to read 
biography because man must be a passion with man, 
to read science because real science is the trituration 
of God’s thoughts, and so to translate biographies, 
geographies, sociologies, astronomies into the talk of 
the common people so that all may know how God has 
done, that is a preacher’s wisdom. 

Every department of human thought must be the 
preacher’s concern solely because he is a man. With 
man he lives; man he is; and the tireless destinies of a 
race are the things with which his own destiny is inex¬ 
tricably tied up. At no point in his career is the 
preacher in more danger of losing his manhood in his 
preacherhood than in his reading. Here is a good place 
to take his stand for the man of him against the 
preacher in him. “Because I am a man I do this,” may 
be a safe criterion for himself. As a fact, some things 
will concern him as a part of his technical curriculum; 
but the real wealth of the preacher’s intellectual life 
lies in that he is so little an artisan and so persistently, 
so inexorably, so entirely a man. Preaching is saying 
human things to humans and divine things to humans, 
and these two voices are actually the only voices books 
possess. 


45 


THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


So, as a man, world classics must be read by the 
preacher. The great poets must be read, the great 
fiction must be read, the great biography must be read, 
the great autobiography must be read; all greatest 
books must be read, as well as very many books not 
great at all, but entirely human and sympathetically di¬ 
vine. “Must” has been the word, and justly. We may 
be said to have no option about great matters. Just 
as, in so far as may be, the great visions must be be¬ 
held—^the mountains, the prairie, the sea and the sky 
and the St. Lawrence’s crystal sweep toward the north¬ 
ern hemisphere of ocean—so the preacher-man who 
would know the high tides of human intelligence must 
be on easy terms with the greatest books of the world. 

These are not so many, but that he may own them 
as he ought. Let each preacher put as the oak center 
of his library the greatest of the great books, put his 
name on the fly leaf and say, boldly, Ex Ubris; have 
the margins of the books scrawled up with his own 
scrawl, so that the strange old masters of saying the 
things of the soul may belong in such fashion to him 
as that these books may never come to the possession 
of another without bearing his bookworm holes through 
and through those pages. 

Just what those greatest books are may be heard 
from keeping alive to the dbiter dicta of such as read 
and such as write the books the world is reading now. 
To follow any one man’s dictum in this selection is 
rather peevish; but to be averse to hearing every man’s 
opinion would be to show oneself intellectually obtuse. 
Few items contain more stimulation than the mention 
46 


THE PREACHER AND HIS BOOKS. 


of books men and women of real insight have read and 
accounted worthy. A preacher may hold to one sug¬ 
gestion with profit; this: he who names the great books 
should have spiritual insight. The list submitted by 
a distinguished American not long ago has this defect: 
it seems not to have spiritual vision. Some timid books, 
and flaccid, are included; some mountainous books are 
omitted. 

The preacher must read; he must read widely; he 
must be aware of things; he must want knowledge and 
feel its thrill; he must want to know and feel, not that 
the cutaneous hearer shall say, “How much he knows!” 
but that all hearers may feel how far afield he has 
gone to bring the message to their immortality. The 
untechnical reading of the preacher, this is his influ¬ 
ential reading. 

Theology he must read and ponder, lest he be a 
guide who knows not the road; but what pertains to 
humanity is, after all, the profoundest sea. Here all 
ships will sail. And it is heartening to my mind, hav¬ 
ing been my lifetime a reader of many books, to note 
with what sure persistency the human sea reaches its 
tide out toward God. The world books are feeling 
after if haply they may find God. The world’s wisest 
love is in happy fact, in glorious fact, in quest of God. 


47 


The Power of the Will in Preaching. 

Curiously enough, though men have been in the 
business of preaching for nineteen centuries, there is as 
yet no recipe for preaching. Poetry and preaching 
stand together, facts for which no explanation can be 
discovered. One man is a poet, and that is the end 
of it; one man is a preacher, and that is the end of 
it. We can not come at the hidings of his power. We 
can not build a preacher. No theological training gets 
up into this hill. Theological training can make bet¬ 
ter preaching, but scarcely better preachers. This 
paradox means that the substance of sermons may be 
bettered by scholarship and knowledge of books and 
how to use them, but the preacher is not as such im¬ 
proved. Preaching can not be imparted any more 
than it can be transmitted. 

Now, of all the books written to tell how to preach, 
not one of them accomplishes the task undertaken. 
Nor is this to be imputed as a fault. They talk about 
their theme, but can not get into it. No fine art can 
be taught. You can teach anatomy, but not painting. 
You can teach theology, but not preaching. One man 
can preach: another man can not preach, and when this 
is said we have gotten to the limit of our tether. 

What might has the will in preaching? My judg¬ 
ment is, we do not know. The soul is so mystifying 
48 


THE POWER OF WH^L IN PREACHING. 


a quantity, the roads leading to it are so many and 
diverse that the means of appeal are clouded as with 
a mountain’s mist. We see the path we take only in 
fragments, as we do a road leading across a moor. 
Men of immense will have sometimes preached with 
power, and sometimes men of no will have preached 
with power. What is the conclusion.?^ This, that the 
no-will man did not preach effectively because he had 
no will, but because he was possessor of other means 
of effective appeal to the soul. In the case of Bishop 
McCabe you must have noted that he was in a strange 
degree efficient. Why.?* His voice.?* His big-natured- 
ness.?* Is it will.?* No. It is nature. That is all. 
We know what it is not, but we do not know what it 
is. Magnetism is the miscellaneous term we apply to 
postpone our defeat in answer. All we know is, he 
had power. 

Wellington and Grant were men of wiU. They 
were Bessemer steel as regards volition. They were not 
orators. Gough was not a man of underscored will 
power, and was an orator. I do not think that any 
faithful portrait of Bishop Simpson would annotate 
his character as distinctively a character of immense 
will power, yet we have not often produced his equal as 
orator. Patrick Henry was not the iron man of the 
Revolutionary era, but was the orator composed of fire 
and clay. General Jackson was iron, but not orator. 
It is not clear but that Calhoun was both. Webster 
was our typical political orator of the highest type, 
and defective in will to a known and lamentable degree. 
Henry Clay was not granitic. Henry Bascom was in 
4 49 


THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


no regard a man of immense will power, but one of 
the most eloquent of bishops of the Methodist Episco¬ 
pal Church, South. Parker was irascible, dogmatic, 
uncertain, and not a pillar, but was in noble fashion 
preacher. Guthrie was not specialist in will. What 
inference are we to draw? No inference as to the use 
of will, only to say that these men of mark as orators 
and preachers have not been distinctive as men of will. 
Their powers lay not there so that we may justly con¬ 
clude, as I think, that will power is a sine qua non to 
great preaching. Such would be a plain perversion of 
the facts. I could show on theory that will power is 
a preaching necessity. I can show by appeal to facts 
that it is not. As between Wesley and Whitefield, the 
will was on the side of Wesley and the preaching power 
per se on the side of Whitefield. 

Preaching appeals to the will. Without the mas¬ 
tery of the will, access to the soul by means of the 
cross is impossible. “I would, but ye would not,” was 
the melancholy word that fell from Jesus’ lips. But 
we are to observe that life is not a military organiza¬ 
tion. In military matters one will becomes dominant. 
There is but one will. Men quit thinking. It is the 
same in the Jesuit college. One will does business for 
the mass. In Christ’s cause it is not so. The master¬ 
ful will can not control the wavering will. The preacher 
can not will his auditors into the kingdom of God. 
You might assume that there was a hypnotic will action 
which would daze the hearer into accord with the 
preacher’s words; but it is not so. It is well it is not. 
There would be increase in accession, but a decrease in 
50 


THE POWER OF WILL IN PREACHING. 


accountability. My belief, founded on the history of 
preaching, is that, as a factor in preaching-power, will 
counts specifically but little. It is not nodal. It mixes 
truly with the blood of all endeavor, but does not of 
necessity color that blood. Fowler had a strong, im¬ 
pelling will, but it is not by it he widened his power 
as orator. It is his thought-breadth, his sense of mass. 

Christ, I take it, had the most efficient will the 
race has shown. He never hesitated. Nothing could 
browbeat Him. He held His breathless way unto the 
cross, and thrust away sword or word which should 
hinder His access to this frightful goal. If we are 
to look for examples of will, He is that example; but 
His ministry was not thrillingly effective. His season 
of unpopularity tramples on the heels of His popu¬ 
larity. He did not in a psychological sense compel 
men. The taking of Man-soul does put into bodily 
form this inefficiency of one will, namely, the God-wiU, 
to drive men to their better and to their best, namely, 
the Christ. Those who would philosophize and prove 
conclusively that in the proportion of will, in that pro¬ 
portion is ministerial success, will find the history of 
preaching blow dead in their faces. I can conclude no 
other. 

Now, to this point, I have been speaking on the 
pulpit efiPectiveness of will power. That was the pur¬ 
pose. My conclusions are that many things are more 
natively effective than will, such as imagination, emo- 
'tion, love, voice, unknowable possession save as it is 
evidenced by power, the presence of the Holy Spirit, 
and many things besides. In business, will is a chief 
51 


THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


factor in success. In no such way could it be claimed 
will is potent in preaching; but that does not argue 
but that, all things computed, he will be most efficient 
in preaching who with all his other oratorical effects 
has will power. 

However, will belongs rather to the background of 
preacher qualifications. A sound will will— 

1. Keep a man at work at his job, will prevent his 
whimpering overmuch, will maintain a plan when once 
entered on, will save his congregation much humilia¬ 
tion by variant moods, will obviate the dominance of 
whimsies, will do what he set out to do with simple 
steadfastness. 

2. Will keep the preacher to the affirmative in 
preaching, will make his habit to be to emphasize the 
known and certain, and not the vague and gratuitous 
assumption; will put him on and keep him on the track 
of facts as opposed to theories, and so will incline his 
preaching to be a roadway on which tired and eager 
souls may walk. 

Will power is liable to become a menace to a 
preacher, seeing it is so very easy for will to become 
a tyrant. More preachers are lost by stubbornness 
than by any other single danger. A man is so likely 
to mistake stubbornness for strength of will, and so 
make a vice his superior virtue. On the other side, a 
good, stout will puts vigor into many a lagging en¬ 
terprise and helps the Church to find its way and walk 
in it. 

Dr. Curry, of Methodist fame, will illustrate the 
uses and abuses of will power in a preacher. Welling- 
52 


THE POWER OF WILL IN PREACHING. 


ton will do the same in secular life. What made him 
a master in battle made him a menace in peace. 
George HI, of unsavory memory, was the last George 
to indulge in a will, for he demolished enough king¬ 
dom by his savage stubbornness to afflict a realm for 
a hundred years. 

So as a man the preacher will take heed to the 
will as a fact and factor in manhood and will have a 
care to avoid its tyrannies and court its helpfulness, 
and in the pulpit will remember that he can not crowd 
people into the kingdom of heaven by a volitional mas¬ 
tery, but must mix his will with his other qualifications 
of soul, praying his God that by all means he may 
become a good minister of Jesus Christ. 

Lord of the quick and dead, teach us the deep 
things we ought to know who lead men’s souls and 
so are weighted down with the immortalities of men. 
Give us the strong will to steadily and beyond frustra¬ 
tion do the wise will of God. May we never waver in 
best things, but may we frankly retrace our steps 
wherein we find ourselves going wrong. Keep us from 
the stubborn will, but keep us to the regal will. 

Whatever lies in the path of steadfast behavior help 
us to espouse. May we be kinsmen of the pole star 
in all right things, and may we wear a track of right 
intent, along which others coming that same road may 
drive their chariots. This we pray in Christ our Lord 
and Savior. Amen. 


53 


The Range of Pulpit Themes. 

The rostrum is as old as democratic institutions. 
The Pulpit is coeval with the life of the Christian 
Church. The Christ Dispensation seems pre-eminently 
a preaching dispensation. The tenets of this new phi¬ 
losophy were by this means to be propagated. The 
whole man is laid under tribute by the gospel. The 
whole man has been redeemed, and the whole man must 
be engaged in the blessed occupation of giving glory 
to redemption’s God. The tongue with its subtle 
power becomes the chiefest instrument in the noble prop- 
agandism of the gospel. 

Certainly Christ was divine. Certainly His doc¬ 
trine was like Himself. Both He and it are evident 
exotics on our earth soil. He has the look of heaven 
on His face, and His doctrines the aroma of heavQn in 
their garments. The student of ecclesiastical history 
who fails to note this, and to lay uninterrupted empha¬ 
sis upon it, as a student, fails to perceive the majesty 
of the doctrine he attempts to study, and as a writer 
will compose a history about the Church, but not of it. 
Rationalism is not competent for the task of becoming 
the biographer of the Christ, the exegete of His doc¬ 
trines, nor the recorder of the triumphs of the con¬ 
quering Son of God. 

But while we hold fast to the divinity of the Founder 

54 


THE RANGE OF PULPIT THEMES. 


and the supernality of the power that lies within and 
behind the truths of the gospel, we must be faithful to 
the record and lay the stress upon the human appli¬ 
ances which Jesus taught us was essential. KarayyAw, 
Kr]pv<T(r(t)f StayyAAo), 8taXcyo/xat, cvayyc\t(^a), XoXeo), these are 
the terms used in the New Testament to indicate the 
preaching vocation, and all in some way mean the proc¬ 
lamation of the truth by the use of the voice. The 
voice is to become the trumpeter who shall announce 
the causes of this war on which we enter, and the terms 
of peace which God in Christ proclaims. As the heart’s 
holiest mission is to love the Christ, so the tongue’s 
holiest mission is to proclaim the Christ. “That which 
we have seen and heard declare we unto you,” says 
the loving and beloved John. Preaching is the noblest 
vocation to which angel or man has ever been called. 
As Jesus “took not on Him the nature of angels, but 
He took on Him the seed of Abraham,” so God called 
not angels, but men, to be the preachers and proclaim- 
ers of that gospel of which they alone were to be the 
beneficiaries. 

Since preaching is so exalted a thing, and the pul¬ 
pit so lofty a throne, it is but fitting that we should 
understand the limits of the one and the province of 
the other. It should be remarked that this writer has 
no pet theory to advance. He can hope to bring no 
new spark from the rock that has been smitten so many 
times, but he will hold close to Christ’s teaching, 
knowing that so holding no erroneous view can be en¬ 
tertained. 

There are two possible dangers in the selection of 

65 


THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


pulpit themes, the one excessive narrowness, the other 
latitudinarianism. Between these two is a happy mean 
which is as boundless as men’s needs and men’s capacity. 
This certainly should be sufficient latitude. 

1. Excessive Narrowness. 

There must be variety in theme. The gospel is one, 
but many in one. No man has a right to turn the pul¬ 
pit into a hippodrome, where he may ride his hobby. 
The hobby rider is a man shorn of half his strength. 
He goes to his task depleted. However sacred the topic, 
it should not be treated perpetually. Man’s intellect 
demands variety. Monotony is distasteful, whether it 
be that of landscape or thought. Let a man have a 
solitary topic, which must be introduced at every oc¬ 
casion, whether the time be opportune or no, he is 
speedily voted a nuisance, and men avoid him. It is 
the same in the pulpit. Men look with disfavor on the 
pastor who will persist in singing all hymns to the 
same tune. They do not care to listen to the same topic 
enlarged upon at every service. Few men can preach 
more than one good sermon from the same text. It 
takes the genius of a great mind to pursue one line 
and not be continually recrossing its own track. 

In my humble opinion the pulpit hobby rider is 
criminal in the discharge of his duty. The preacher 
is to captivate men for the gospel. He must storm the 
citadel of the intellect, that he may so reach the heart. 
Perpetual sameness creates nausea. The reiterated tes¬ 
timony of experience is that the preachers who persist 
in preaching on one theme at all times and from all 
56 


THE RANGE OF PULPIT THEMES. 


texts are not those who bring men most under the be¬ 
nign influence of the gospel truth. It is foolish for 
men to say “they ought to like it, and it is good for 
them.” They do not like it. The man of God who 
knows the sublimity of the mission to which heaven 
has called him will bring forth from the treasure 
“things new and old.” I believe the variety in nature 
is deeply suggested here: “Nature,” says Bryant, 
“speaks a various language.” No dull invariability be¬ 
longs to her. It is so with the Book of God. Its theme 
is one; its method of treatment is diversified. I affirm 
that no thinker would ever dream of calling the Bible 
monotonous. I can not conceive how it could be so 
considered. In the changing beauty of the Book of 
God lies much of its almost irresistible attractiveness. 
It leaps above the heavens: it plunges into the deep: 
it is black with wrath: it glows with glory: it speaks 
gently as a woman’s caressing speech: it trumpets its 
word in Sinai thunder. It thus appears that if we are 
to be taught by the book of nature or by the Book of 
God, or instructed by the regimen of common sense, that 
monotony of theme is to be avoided if a man would 
adequately express the “counsels of God once delivered 
to the saints.” 


2. Latitudinarianism. 

The second danger is that of latitudinarianism. 
This term in this connection needs explanation. It is 
not to include a too wide range of thought. To him 
who has the latitude of eternity, the “unsearchable 
riches of Christ,” and the insoluble mysteries of the di- 
57 


THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


vine nature, what train of thought can be too exten¬ 
sive? It is not a danger of too much or too extended 
thought, but rather the ranging to topics oiF the levels 
of the gospel. It is the staying down in the marsh¬ 
land, when he might dwell in the mountain. It is the 
coming down to the trivialities, when one might be con¬ 
cerned with the colossal. The man who goes far for 
topics for pulpit treatment has always seemed to me to 
have misconceived the richer glory of the illimitable 
fields, where he was commanded to go and reap. 

Do not misconceive me; I am in no sense a cham¬ 
pion of a man always keeping to one or a score of topics. 
He must not rehearse the whole Bible at a single effort, 
but he must be conversant with the wide range of things 
presented in the Scripture. That Book, as a homiletic 
text, seems as if made for the preacher; the variety, 
beauty, pathos, sublimity, realism, idealism, strike one 
with amazement. As a specialist the preacher has that 
which forever renders his going to new fields for themes 
a needless expenditure of effort. I am no stickler in re¬ 
gard to the often mentioned sensationalism. That is 
often a blessing. The gospel on Pentecost was con¬ 
fessedly sensational. It aroused, fired, amazed. Some 
so-called sensational preaching is, instead, sense preach¬ 
ing. Being dull and uninteresting some divines inter¬ 
pret as being non-sensational, while the living Word, 
the keen thrust of wit, or irony, or strength of presen¬ 
tation they interpret as sensational. I have no fellow- 
feeling with this narrow mood. It is narrow and un- 
philosophical. The preacher’s business is to create a 
hearing. A preacher is commissioned of God to make 
68 


THE RANGE OF PULPIT THEMES;. 


men listen. “How can they hear without a preacher 
is Paul’s putting of the case. God commissions the 
preacher to bring forth from the armory of intellect 
every weapon with which he can make execution for 
God. But some ministers take topics to lecture on. 
They fail to preach. They seem to have a call to turn 
the pulpit into a lecture platform. In my humble opin¬ 
ion this is coming down from the eminence to grovel 
in the morass. Some take current topics and discuss 
them: as, “Robert Elsmere,” “John Ward, Preacher,” 
and similar topics. They turn themselves into a news¬ 
dealer’s bulletin-board and receive no compensation for 
their services. I think it is generally accepted as a 
truth that the sale of “Robert Elsmere” was indefinitely 
extended by this method of advertisement. The doubt 
in the book was effete: its skepticism was diluted and 
colorless. The character of Elsmere was as weak a 
thing to be called character as one can well conceive. 
The book was prosy and unsatisfactory. The author’s 
polemic and philosophical powers were patently of a 
mediocre sort, and she herself appeared a weak imita¬ 
tion of Matthew Arnold. The ministry took the book 
in hand and gave it a notoriety and sale wholly dis¬ 
proportionate to its merits. A minister of my ac¬ 
quaintance gave an hour and a half to a review of the 
novel of the day, when he might have been discussing 
the themes of eternity. He sent his auditors home 
eager to buy the book. It seems a misfortune to take 
Goliath’s blade to slay a weakling. 

The ground taken is that a wealth of theme which 
can not be exhausted is presented in the Book of God. 
59 


THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


Why not hold to the Bible topics? They are dignified, 
they are diversified, they sweep the horizon of our 
human desires, powers, and needs. The passing his¬ 
tory, the range of science, the beauty of poetry, the 
strength of elucidation embodied in history, all these 
are here for the pulpit; but they are to be handmaids, 
and not mistresses. This expresses a real distinction. 
The apostle enjoined, ‘‘Preach the Word.” That is 
terra incognita in its farthest reachings. Who can 
exhaust this inexhaustible? Astronomy, geology, the 
motives, the will, the affection, the individual, so¬ 
ciology, the desires, the intellect, eternity, conduct— 
these, and multitudes of others, are contained in the 
Book of God. Who can name the themes the Scrip¬ 
tures give? All the world is to pay tribute to this su¬ 
preme business of elucidating the truths of religion, 
but let the minister “rightly divide the word of truth.” 
Scripture is “profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for 
correction, and instruction in righteousness.” What 
a scale of utilities is here? Doctrines are to be ex¬ 
pounded, reproof to be administered, correction to 
be portioned out, instruction to be given; such is the 
Pauline idea. “Feed My sheep,” said Jesus. Lead 
into green pastures and beside still waters; here is the 
preacher’s field. I marvel if a man need stray from 
such a broad field as this. 

It seems to me a question of more than passing in¬ 
terest whether, the greatest preaching may not hold 
with close adherence to the Book of God, whether it 
be really the broad policy to discuss the world’s affairs 
too much in the pulpit, whether the experience of such 
60 


THE RANGE OF PULPIT THEMES. 


men as Beecher, Parker, Spurgeon, and Simpson be not 
profoundly instructed, and whether that instruction be 
not to this effect; namely, the world wants to hear the 
gospel; it comes, if it come, on the Sabbath to breathe 
new air, to get balm it knows not of. The turning 
the pulpit into a Sunday newspaper is, it seems to me, 
not consonant with the spirit of the pulpit. It has a 
different vantage ground. It discusses life from God’s 
standpoint. It tries to show how the divine idea dwarfs 
the human concept. Its chiefest mission is to elevate, 
to inspire, to ennoble—to ennoble by inspiring. May 
it not be said in the selection of pulpit themes, as Paul 
said, in the selection of food, ‘‘All things are lawful 
for me, but all things are not expedient.” Religion is 
of the earth, but not “of the earth earthy.” And the 
strained attempt that many pulpiteers make to have it 
appear a common, every-day affair is a misconception, 
egregious and unpardonable. The race needs to be 
brought up to theology, not theology debased to the 
race. Christ came to the earth to lift up. “And I, 
if I be lifted up, will draw all men unto Me,” shows 
the Christ plan. This idea should underlie the whole 
fabric of ministerial labor and life. The mystery of 
lifting man is the secret with which he has been en¬ 
trusted. I do not lean to mysticism. I do not deem 
it essential that a man should receive the tenets or use 
the nomenclature of the Pietist; but I do deem it es¬ 
sential that he should comprehend the Sabbath as a 
day, yet God’s day. That word means much. But 
little meaning is attached to it by some. I do not think 
the pulpit the place nor the Sabbath the time for a 
61 


THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


man to rehearse his exploits among men as he walked 
in thin disguise among them, pretending to be what he 
is not; that is, that a man should pretend to be a la¬ 
borer, a hod-carrier, and such like for the purpose of 
preaching on Sabbath. That seems to me a sickly sen¬ 
sational method of dealing with great topics. The so¬ 
ciology of the Scripture needs no such tricks of trade 
for its study. Heavenly-mindedness is in the gospel. 
Let it be far from us to remove it. The selecting the 
themes and the handling of them, to my mind, becomes 
ill-advised and unsatisfactory when we pander to a viti¬ 
ated taste and godless tendency and current discussion. 
The ambassador of heaven transforms the pulpit in 
theme and speech into a rest-day rehearsal of work-day 
topics flavored with a diluted gospel flavor. “The glo¬ 
rious gospel” is a thing fit to enchant men when rightly 
preached. Let it not soar above man; but let it not get 
below with them to tarry there; but rather fellowship 
with them as Jesus did, who led men up from the 
valley of misconception and unbelief to the mountain, 
where they saw the heavens receive Him out of their 
sight; and they turned thence with great joy. 

The pulpit is to get men near to heaven. If it 
fails in this, great and irreparable is the failure. 


62 


Relation of the Pulpit to Civic Affairs. 

The preacher is the man Christ left to say His 
words to men. He is to say the thing Christ would 
say if He were here. Nothing must obscure this en¬ 
gaging and at the same oppressive truth. The preacher 
must be no less than this and can be no more. It thus 
happens that the chief of homiletic teachers is Jesus 
Himself. He left us to take up His unfinished work 
and, so to say, to preach His sermon to the close. The 
cross smote Him ere He was through His Sermon on 
the Mount, and we are licensed to tell those things He 
had not time to tell. This view makes preaching a 
very great business and, because Christ is so exhaust¬ 
less, an exhaustless business. So that our largest busi¬ 
ness as preachers is to be certain we have the current 
of the stream of Christ’s thought and life. Not all 
works on homiletics are worthy compared with the 
simple majesty of movement and might in Jesus. He 
was the preacher at His best. He knew what was in 
man and what was in God. He had a passion for men’s 
souls and bodies, a hatred of sin and sense of its hein¬ 
ousness, a love for folk unmixed with any caste bias, 
a readiness to give men light and life, a love for little 
children, a compassion wide as the weeping of broken 
hearts, a faith in men unbroken by disappointment in 
63 



THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 

them, and a laughing heart that made merry with the 
thought of God. He saw great truths clearly, and so 
could preach them lucidly; He knew the gradations of 
values and relations so that He never put in the sec¬ 
ond place a truth which was primary and must in right¬ 
ness have primacy, nor ever exalted to primacy any 
subordinate consideration. There was in Him the level 
view, the certain step, and a man’s grasp. Christ 
preached to ones. He dealt not in twos. He spared 
not any labor on the single soul, as witness His ser¬ 
mon sublime as the night skies which He preached to 
an ignorant woman, and the verification He allowed the 
hesitant Thomas, and the look He gave the swearing 
Peter. Christ was the apostle of the single-man. “I 
have somewhat to say unto thee,” is His ringing word 
calling the centuries through. No noise can deluge that 
thought nor that voice. The preacher’s primary mis¬ 
sion is to preach to a man, not to men. He must get 
men by the hand-process. The preacher in my opinion 
is in grave danger just here. He thinks to mass men 
and colonize the kingdom of God. That can not be 
done. It has been tried; and it has failed. The early 
Church we call the Apostolic Church held to Jesus’ way 
and succeeded: the later Church hasted, baptized tribes 
instead of men, and—failed. Our modern ministry is 
in danger of this post-apostolic haste. We are wor¬ 
ried by the talk on sociology. The clamorer has frus¬ 
trated us. We have had our head turned, and in that 
muddled state have supposed that university settlements, 
neighborhood houses, institutional Churches, and such 
like have an appeal the gospel has not. The civic seems 
64 


PULPIT TO CIVIC AFFAIRS. 


large, imposing, accelerated, as compared with the old 
method of one man at once. 

And besides, we must be modern and up to date. 
To hear much contemporaneous talk one would imagine 
that our predecessors had scant sight of the real regen¬ 
erative methods. We are they who have climbed this 
Ararat. Now the sedate fact is, we must always get 
back to Jesus. He had the right method and the right 
theology. Evolution must learn a touch of humility 
in the presence of Jesus. He grew as a root out of dry 
ground and is beyond praise as he is beyond blame, 
and brought to flower and fruit the gospel means and 
might, so that we are all copyists. The first line of 
writing is his: the poor zigzags are ours. 

Now, Jesus was not civic, but human. He held 
to the man and would not let him go. This does not 
mean that Jesus aspersed or neglected the civic, but 
does mean that He was not blinded as to the right 
procedure. The staite follows the man. Man is big¬ 
ger than a state. Rome did not know that. Jesus did 
know that; and for such reason Rome is dead and 
Christ was never so much alive. A right man will 
found a right state, was Jesus’ apparent theory. He 
would not have agreed with Bellamy, nor any form of 
nationalism nor socialism. He knew too much. He 
knew that bad men would build a hell if a hell were 
not built for them, and that good men would clean 
the slums of hell and make of it a paradise. From 
these considerations I adduce the conclusion that the 
preacher’s significant business is with preaching salva¬ 
tion for each man’s life. The necessity of the blood 
5 65 


THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


of Christ, the turpitude of sin, the might of the Sav¬ 
ior, the glory and the beauty of a life hid with Christ 
in God—^that preaching is the great preaching. It 
includes ^nd excludes. The pulpit is not by calling a 
civic function. It is a voice from heaven. It is the 
God invasion of this world. It is the sky speaking to 
the clouds. The uppermost speaking to the undermost 
and for the divinities within it. If such theory of the 
pulpit be right, how plain the preacher’s message be¬ 
comes. He understands the art of inflection. His em¬ 
phasis becomes appropriate. He is blowing on an 
angel’s trumpet. His pulpit is seen not to be a forum 
for the many themes, but a rostrum for the one theme. 
His theme has him rather than he having the theme. 
He is hard after the one lost sheep. Life calls to him 
from the depths as from the heights, and his feet hurry, 
as if wings were on them, to meet the need he knows. 

Therefore his ministry is not primarily civic. Not 
primarily for the state, but primarily for the man. 
He wants the state for God, but knows he must have 
the man for God, or man and state will be reprobate. 
I think some among us have lost God’s emphasis. We 
have flatted a little, as some singers do. We have 
thought a nation was larger theme than a man; and 
we were mistaken. The man regenerated will include 
the State. 

Now, the question of primacy of theme and em¬ 
phasis settled, the preacher may preach any good thing. 
Morals, intelligence, manliness, womanliness, obedience 
to law, the duties of employers and of employees, and 
all the range of duties, pleasures, harmonies, and majes- 
66 


PULPIT TO CIVIC AFFAIRS. 


ties of life, only they must be, as the bass in music, 
written below the treble. They are an inclusion, and 
not the sky. Paul illustrates this in his books and 
preaching. You can not mistake his theme. He is 
preaching Christ, and Him crucified, and that by faith 
in Him man is justified. That music is always in the 
air. But after that and in that you shall hear all sorts 
of counsels and every sort of message. To his large 
heart there are no trivialities. He summons men to live 
in God and to walk worthy of so high a calling. So 
he preaches citizenship. He wants men to be no brawl¬ 
ers, but sane, law-abiding, conscience-keeping; render¬ 
ing honor to rulers, seeing they are the normal heads 
of states; and institutions, he says, are of God. Law 
hath its home, as Hooker has it, in the bosom of God. 
God stands against lawlessness and for good order. 
Governments have this end in view if they merit the 
name they bear. Paul would remind the Christians 
that they belonged to God, and so they belonged to 
the order of law; for neither their Master nor them¬ 
selves were anarchists. Christ had courteous attitudes 
to governments, and in His now world-famous saying, 
“Render therefore unto Caesar the things that are 
Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s,” He 
has forever put government on its feet and suggested 
that it is subordinate to the government of God. 

The preacher is a citizen. He ought to love his 
country. He must not be colorless in patriotism. He 
should love his city. Paul did. “A citizen of no mean 
city,” is the proud and citizenlike way he put it. Let 
the preacher do no less. The preacher is a Christian 

67 



THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


citizen. He is loyal to God first. His country love 
is not his first love. God is the “name his soul adores.” 
But he loves his country not less because of this, but 
rather more. God expands the heart and makes it roomy 
for the containing many things. A Christian citizen, 
therefore, against wrong, for right. He votes, and 
votes according to his best judgment, right. He does 
not let anybody, committee or man or woman, tell him 
what ticket to vote. He standeth for himself. He is, 
as I think, a party man; for parties are, like Churches, 
essential to a championship of ideas. He votes. People 
know his party, but he does not need to prate about 
it, but must not be ashamed of it and try to hide it, as 
I have occasionally known preachers to do. Every 
manly layman will respect the political beliefs of his 
preacher; and his preacher must do the same by the 
political beliefs of his members. Here, then, stands 
the preacher, a Christian citizen, so known by all of 
the community. He prays, votes, has convictions, holds 
to them with manly determination, but never dogma¬ 
tizes, remembering that he does not monopolize intelli¬ 
gence nor conscience. He does not preach politics. It 
is easy for a preacher to think his particular kind of 
politics a type of religion. It is not. No politics in 
the present American forum are other than politics, 
and the preacher who thinks them a religion simply mis¬ 
takes his own wishes for religious consciousness. 

The pulpit should be calm. No ranting should be 
allowed to one’s own thought. The jumping at or on 
every thing of a civic character is absurd; and people 
know it. The preacher readily runs to civic extrava- 
68 


PULPIT TO CIVIC AFFAIRS. 

gances unless he is on the watch. He should weigh 
matters well ere he broaches them. I have known where 
without thorough investigation a pulpit has fulminated 
against certain men or measures, and on Monday even¬ 
ing has been compelled to retract. This is unforgiv¬ 
able. Calmness of mood would obviate this humilia¬ 
tion and would make for a preacher’s self-respect. Be¬ 
sides, talking on civic and urban affairs is a disease, 
sometimes. The newspapers are given to asking of 
ministers, when some blood is up in city affairs, “Are 
you going to say anything on such and such subjects? 
If so, we wish a report of the sermon.” Many a young 
preacher has been hamstrung here. He was appealed 
to on his sensational side, and yielded to the appeal; 
and the newspaper men laughed and chugged each other 
in the sides. We may well try the spirits here. When 
one gets at the business, it is an epidemic; and epi¬ 
demics are not healthy. I have found it pretty safe 
not to talk on what all the preachers are talking on. 
It is well to have a diversity of topics on any Lord’s 
day. If preachers could always be relied on by the 
public to have accurate information on civic matters 
before they fired a gun or a salute, it would make for 
the dignity of pulpit utterance and for ministerial 
weight in the counsels of a community. The pulpit 
is not to harangue, but to command the attention of 
a city or state by the weighed and sober judgments 
expressed. Most civic matters are not of importance 
enough for pulpit treatment. One minister once gave 
a pulpit editorial on the high price of opera tickets. 
The proceeding was humorous. Absurd things in a 
69 


THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


city or state may be held up to ridicule by a passing 
word which does not unduly magnify the thing, but 
does give it the drubbing needed. 

The pulpit should be sympathetic. The community 
should feel that the preacher has a citizen’s heart. He 
should be free to commend, not apt to fault. The fault¬ 
ing process is so readily acquired and so cheap as to 
demand that the pulpit put a guard on its lips. In 
the main, city or nation are in the right. Things go 
pretty well. Many things are worthy commendation: 
and a wise pulpit will study to hold up to the day¬ 
light the wise and good deeds of those in authority and 
show how officers are mainly honest in the discharge 
of their several duties. For instance: unless the prov¬ 
ocation be severe, a pulpit should not hold policemen 
up to ridicule, for the reason that they are the guard¬ 
ians of the public life and safety, and whenever op¬ 
portunity offers in the brave act of some policeman a 
warm word should be offered. Praise is none too plenty; 
and we preachers who often are as dry at the heart 
as we are at the lips when preaching, and are so be¬ 
cause those who hear us are so infrequent in the word, 
“Your sermon helped me so,”—we preachers ought to 
study the thoughtful word of praise. 

The pulpit should discriminate with painstaking 
care between questions of policy and questions of con¬ 
science. That is not so easy as appears. It is not 
hard to make everything a conscience issue. Gambling 
is a question of conscience; riding a bicycle is not. 
One thing is directly wrong: the other may be wrong 
in relation. Sabbath observance is a conscience ques- 
70 


PULPIT TO CIVIC AFFAIRS. 

tion; but the method of baptism with us Methodists is 
not. Antagonism to the whisky business is a conscience 
matter, but the exact modus operandi of that antago¬ 
nism is a question of method on which good men may 
differ. The majority of matters purely civic are politic 
questions, such as tariff, reciprocity, government owner¬ 
ship, and the like. A single-tax man wants a preacher 
to vend his wares, and attempts to browbeat him into 
championship of those views. The wise preacher, I 
take it, will not venture into politico-economic mat¬ 
ters till he has pioneered his way with painstaking 
care and comprehensiveness. But in any case these are 
not conscience stock. They are views. Much talk is 
had in our immediate times about city ownership. My 
own feeling is that such procedure violates the propri¬ 
eties of the nation and city, and the rights of the in¬ 
dividual, and I feel that sometimes in passing it is both 
stimulating to the congregation’s thought and possible 
conduct, to toss out a notion regarding it as a man 
might throw a show bill out of a car window, so as to 
get into the chance hands of some passer-by. 

‘‘He loved our nation,” was the recommendation cer¬ 
tain Jews wrote for a certain centurion; and it is a good 
recommendation for any preacher as well. Against the 
bad, for the good; earnest, but not fanatical; discrimi¬ 
nating between his views and absolute, necessary truth; 
charitable toward those who differ from him; alive to 
the value of the state and the city; a live man, and not 
a pedant; a citizen of this world as well as of the next, 
and so consistently interested in both—such a man will 
make his pulpit a throne from which issue only edicts 

71 


THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


of manifest worth and sweet and wholesome counsel. 
Such pulpit will favor the public school, urge in wise 
ways the Bible in the schools, keep himself wide-awake 
against Roman Catholic encroachment, but deal with it 
rarely, aggrandize citizenship by pressing on the 
thought of his people the right and obligation of vot¬ 
ing, steer clear of sentimentality toward criminal 
classes, teach with never a variation the doctrine that 
the sole way to make a good State is to have regen¬ 
erated citizens, and that Christ in us is not only the 
hope of glory, but the hope of earth. 

In such matters as municipal reform—^the fight on 
the saloon, and the like—what is the pulpit relation 
here? Well, as the judgment of this writer goes, it 
is largely one of inspiration. I think that temper¬ 
ance, among other things, has been hurt by preachers 
becoming the chief warriors. Laymen have come to 
expect the preachers to do the work laymen ought to 
do, and find fault if the preachers will not. Here 
preachers should take a stand and say this ought to 
be done, and the laymen ought to do it, and by in¬ 
sistence they will. Let every man bear his own burden. 
A preacher should be kept as free as honestly may be 
from local antagonisms, and he who enters bodily into 
local fights will stir up such antagonism as can not be 
overcome. I have, as a general rule, seen that the 
preacher who became a fighter in person wrought only 
short-lived havoc and long-lived disability. There are, 
to be sure, exceptions, but I speak of the general rule. 
The preacher should be the prodder. Here he can get 
leverage. Here is his might. To throw the work on 
72 


PULPIT TO CIVIC AFFAIRS. 


others’ shoulders is more the act of generalship than 
to do all the lugging one’s-self. The preacher must be 
no coward; but since he is, in the nature of the case, a 
temporality—^here to-day, there to-morrow—his per¬ 
sonal battle-mood leaves the work little stronger, 
whereas to educate the community to do its duty leaves 
the work unemasculated when the preacher moves on. 
Statesmanship should be the preacher’s keyword. 

This I conceive in rude outline to be the pulpit 
relation to the State and civic affairs. He hails the 
good; celebrates the better life of the city and man¬ 
kind as if he were a minstrel celebrating a triumph; 
makes by pulpit ministration for virility of Christian 
life, and so of Christian attitude; makes men know that 
the pulpit’s severe and glad allegiancy is to God, and 
under Him to all good things. Such a pulpit will be 
worth more than a fortified citadel to the manners and 
morals of a municipality and a commonwealth. 


73 



How to Reach the Rich and the Poor 
with the Gospel. 

This double caption is taken because there is so 
much witless talk of this sort, and from men who 
ought to know better. But the title may direct 
thought to what are the actualities in which he must 
deal who does a man’s work for saving the race of men. 

To be perfectly frank, which is the merit of any 
discussion, the crux is not how to reach the rich with 
the gospel any more than it is how to reach the poor 
with the gospel. Nor vice versa. The crux is, in my 
belief. How to reach people with the gospel. De¬ 
mocracy is on us much more than we are apt to com¬ 
pute. The appeal of the Christ is not to poor, not 
to rich, but to men. And in America in particular, 
where the doctrine of democracy has planted its feet 
so flat on the soil, any class appeal is the more repre¬ 
hensible and inappropriate. We have gotten the 
wrong mood on us when we talk of classes and masses, 
when we discuss rich and poor as gospel recipients. 
Americans do not take kindly to be singled out as 
objects of class discussion. You can not patronize an 
American because he is poor, nor can you do obeisance 
to an American because he is rich. The appeal which 
is American is the appeal to man as man, to woman 
74 


REACHING THE RICH AND THE POOR. 

as woman. He who wants other is expatriated as regards 
American spirit. This is why the Salvation Army, 
good as its intentions are, can never have any deepest 
rooting in our American soil. They appeal to a man 
because he is poor, because he belongs to a class. This 
appeal works well in England, where the social struc¬ 
ture is built on class, but works ill in our soil, where 
the entire fabric has for its logic that there is but one 
class, namely, men. If you rejoin that in America there 
are cliques: social, blooded, old-familied, moneyed—my 
reply is that your observation is just, but does not, in 
my opinion, touch the point under discussion. There 
must always be a minority who will not feel the at¬ 
mosphere which enswathes them. Mummies will not. 
They are not eligible to air or sky. But such persons 
are a mere fistful as compared with the consequential 
millions which compose the Republic; and not by them, 
but by the rank and file of common men, are a coun¬ 
try’s ideals to be weighed, understood, defended, propa¬ 
gated. Our system is against caste; European systems 
are for caste. No aristocracy, whether of money, 
family, or what not, can be maintained where laws are 
not enacted for such maintenance. Primogeniture and 
entail are the essentials of retention of fortune in fami¬ 
lies. Money flits when brains flit; and brains are not 
transmissible. The father makes; the son unmakes. 
This is the democratizing tendency which God has put 
into the warp of society. The Four Hundred changes. 
I am told that Ward McAllister is dead. It was time. 
His brood will die. America has contempt for any dis¬ 
position to erect any aristocracy other than manhood. 
75 


THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


Character can never become cheap. It will always 
be at a premium. 

Now, what a feverish few rich want and affect is 
not of importance any more than what a fever patient’s 
appetite is makes a regimen for the diet of healthy men. 
My observation of the rich as they have come under 
my eye (though I profess no profound knowledge 
here or in any other department) is that they are sane 
and genial and democratic. They neither affect to 
be a coterie nor wish to be. Riches are so ephemeral 
as to be a frivolous basis for aristocracy. This, as I 
confidently believe, is usually felt by the rich in Amer¬ 
ica. Some of the most democratic people I have ever 
associated with have been the richest I have known. 
I have never found it either Christian or American 
to appeal to any man because he was poor. I am poor, 
but would not let a man appeal to me as “my friend 
who is poor.” I like my estate, but do not care to 
have any farm it or me. Poverty is an accident; Char¬ 
acter is in the blood. There is no gospel for the poor: 
there is no gospel for the rich. 

^ A gospel for men, wicked, weary, heavily laden 
with their cares of mind, body, heart, memory—^men 
with divine instincts, however untended, men I have 
found, and have found that the appeal to life, the ap¬ 
peal to the mightier impulses, conscience, character, 
God, eternity, retribution, love, Christ, touched one as 
another. No man needs to say, “This is a rich man’s 
gospel,” and “This is a poor man’s gospel.” Both will 
sneer at his lack of psychological insight. Both will 
think him mediaeval. Both despise his failure to catch 
76 


REACHING THE RICH AND THE POOR. 


the tones and music of his Master, Christ, who came to 
save all men, and whose call was to all those who had 
parched lips of thirst, saying. Let all such come and 
drink. 

My belief is that a preacher should never allow his 
thought to say to its private ear ‘‘rich” and “poor.” 
They are words which find no place in the preacher’s 
lexicon. If he thinks “poor” he will be in danger of 
patronizing a man because his cash is low or lost, than 
which nothing is less forgivable. What do preachers 
care for “poor,” save as it needs ministering to? Does 
a preacher say, “I will go and visit the poor?” or re¬ 
port to his wife at evening, “I have been out visiting 
the lowly poor?” If he does he should be ousted from 
the ministry. He has so utterly failed of the mind of 
Christ. Or does he say, “I will go and visit the rich?” 
I make bold to believe that not a manly preacher would 
be guilty of so barren a thought. We go to visit men 
and women and children. It does not occur to us to 
consider whether they are rich or poor. They are our 
people; and we love them, and they love us, and we 
want to see them. That is the end of the deliberation. 
I give this business simply as I find it. I have found 
one gospel applicable to both poor and rich, so that 
in its preaching there are neither rich nor poor. “The 
poor have the gospel preached unto them,” was the 
winsome thing Jesus said to John: but Christianity 
has done away with the distinction to which it came. 
“Men have the gospel preached to them,” is the put¬ 
ting of the case Christ has instituted in the world. 

I think that perhaps preachers are sometimes afraid 

77 


THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


of the rich: they think they may be captious or peevish 
or sensitive or want undue recognition or feel their 
wealth. I have not so found them. The rich (that is, 
of course, the rich with brains) are as approachable, 
as democratic, as open to suggestion, as kindly in their 
reception and appreciation of the gospel as any mem¬ 
bers of the congregation. I have never found it nec¬ 
essary in my utmost privacy of thinking to divide my 
congregation into the rich and poor. I find no such 
psychological distinction. I find no such ecclesiastical 
distinction, just as I do not find it needed to divide peo¬ 
ple into cultivated and ignorant. Anybody is smart 
enough; nobody is too smart. And we preachers have 
much ado to keep up with everybody in our crowds. 
God stands for democracy with such persistency as to 
make obliviousness to it impossible. When I began 
my ministry I was told by the well meaning, both lay 
and ministerial, that a preacher need not give much 
pastoral attention to the rich of his congregation: 
they would not care whether he came or not; but he 
must give plenty of attention to the poor. I rejoice 
to say that my sum total of observation and experience 
contradicts those witless words. I have found the 
richest people I have ministered to not less glad to have 
me come and visit with them and their children than 
anybody else. Indeed, I have never been received at 
any homes with more considerate courtesy than at such 
homes. The busy men have been swift to drop their 
crowded hands for a little chat with the preacher. 

Besides, the hurts which assail the soul have no con¬ 
nection with money. The great and the wealthy still 
78 


REACHING THE RICH AND THE POOR. 


find the wounds that let the heart’s best blood are such 
wounds as all this world must wear. I have ministered 
to men of national name and consequence, and found 
them wounded nigh to die, so that they would fall on 
my neck like a wounded child. Their hearts had not 
a great man’s griefs, but a man’s griefs. A son whose 
honor was tarnished makes a man whose wealth is co¬ 
lossal bite the dust. Rachels weep for their firstborn, 
no matter whether they live in rented house or palace. 
There is no aristocracy of pain or care or responsibility. 
The same swords are digging blindly at the hearts of 
humankind. We have no call to be afraid of the rich. 
They need us if anybody needs us, and will want us and 
love us if we are wantable and lovable. 

Then we sometimes think these must be approached 
with special care. They must be handled like Venice 
glass. We are self-conscious when we come to them. 
We have a hint of man-service in our eyes. This, of 
course, is obnoxious to men and women of fine charac¬ 
ter. They think ill of us for our folly. They do not 
want to be handled with white kid gloves, but with the 
naked hands. They are not on dress parade. They 
are folks, and want to be so conceived. If we are 
asked how to get the unchurched rich to the church, 
the answer is . the same as how to get the non-churched 
poor to the church. Nobody knows. Everybody wants 
to find out. We should, as ministers of our Divine Sav¬ 
ior, be assiduous in trying to find the clue to the maze 
of anybody’s life. That is our severest service. That 
is what we pray to know. So that a preacher should 
honorably use every social and public or private op- 
79 


THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


portunity to get into sympathetic touch with any one 
not a Christian. He should always be baiting hooks 
to catch men. This skill we are not masters of, but with 
tears and anguish try to become masters of. But peo¬ 
ple will come or will not come to God’s house. That 
is the last word. “They will not come that they may 
have life,” so Jesus conceives the case. But in no 
case should a preacher make his platform for abusing 
the rich or the poor or indiscriminately lauding the 
poor or the rich. No man is good because he is poor, 
though I think some would be persuaded so to hear 
some of us preach. We talk of poverty as if it were 
a virtue, and riches as if they were crimes. We need 
a baptism of sense. An immersion would not hurt us. 
Frequently it is much to a man’s credit to be rich, if 
so be his own brains and hands have made him so. Never 
abuse achievement unless it is manifestly vicious, and 
never laud failure unless it is a failure which springs 
from conscience mixed with the blood. Let us have a 
human pulpit. A pulpit which appeals to the weary- 
hearted, the fagged, the lonely, the betternesses in every 
make-up, the warm pressure of a hand certainly tender, 
but strong and human, the love of children, the esteem 
for women, the strengthening touch of such as have 
been with men and women and children and have learned 
of them, and have been with bards and prophets and 
achiever and romancist and have learned of them, and 
have been with stone and rock and flower and flowing 
river and momentous sea and have learned of them, and 
have been with the triune of God, Father and Son and 
Holy Ghost, and have learned of Him—that sort of pul- 
80 


REACHING THE RICH AND THE POOR. 


pit will have an appeal not touched with sordid thoughts 
of are men rich or poor, but only touched with this ra¬ 
diant thought, “These are they for whom Christ died 
and in its limits such pulpit will have appeal, and such 
Church will make itself felt as a place where “the rich 
and the poor meet together, for the Lord is the Maker 
of them all.” 


81 


The Secret of Effective Preaching— 
An Attempt. 

Preaching is the most complicated among the crafts. 
This is so because it is a first-hand dealing with the 
souls of humanity with reference to those things where 
persuasion is most difficult. Business, politics, learning, 
science, letters, all have a ground of effective appeal in 
the immediate, the utilitarian, in part or in whole. They 
promise speedy returns. They belong to the now. Re¬ 
ligion means expenditure, means philanthropy, means 
omission, means exscinding, means abhorring what to the 
normal mood of men is dear as life. Preaching is fight¬ 
ing a mob, so to say, flying in the face of every antag¬ 
onism. This statement of the fact is explanation of 
the complexity of the preaching craft. It is wrestling 
with the sons of Anak. There is an effective preaching, 
and there is a secret. What effective preaching is we 
may know, but what its secret is we may not be so sure 
of knowing. Things have a habit of keeping their se¬ 
crets. Might is not voluble. Electricity preserves its 
silence unbroken, working wonders, coming graciously 
under human control, but affording no intimation of 
the method of its might. From Samson artful Delilah 
could inveigle the secret of strength, but not so from 
nature Samsons. We have not caught the mystery of 
a single fact of this wide world. We are as much in 
the dark about reasons as when first men unlocked the 
82 


THE SECRET OF EFFECTIVE PREACHING. 


door and sidled into the laboratory of physical science. 
Secrets are not our specialty. 

Effective preaching I would define as the art of 
bringing men into the mood of God and keeping them 
there. This implies introduction and tuition. Both 
are emphatic and elemental suggestions. One is the re¬ 
vivalist, the other the pastoral office. One initiates, the 
other upbuilds. 

Sometimes the Church has forgotten the one or the 
other. Preaching is not one or the other, but both. 
The gospel must get control over, and then keep con¬ 
trol over. Getting men to God and keeping men with 
God is the purpose of all preaching which aspires to 
be effective. Anything less is failure. Anything more 
is inconceivable. Now, what is the secret of this sur¬ 
prising and heavenly calling.? Here is the rub. Who 
are we, to be introduced into this divine mystery ? What 
claim have common men, to be let into the profoundest 
mystery the mind of man has conceived or attempted.? 
Yet, for this secret every minister of Christ searches 
with prayers and tears, in sackcloth and ashes. What is 
the secret of making men like God.? How august the 
inquiry, how holy the quest! Now, all we may ra¬ 
tionally hope to achieve in way of answer is to candidly 
name some symptoms of the secret; for the secret is 
hid from the eyes of the wise and prudent, nor is it in 
necessity revealed to babes. Men have more or less of 
this power, is what we know and practically the limit of 
our knowing. We have seen men who did build men 
up in the faith. Let us then consider such men. 

The method of this investigation must be to consider 

83 


THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


such preaching as has been effective, and attempt to 
win suggestion from it which may contain some breath 
of the secret. For more than a breath we shall scarcely 
find. 

1. The Personae Element. What a man is, in 
himself, counts, and counts for much. What this means 
and is we do not know. A preacher may be dull as 
dust in what he says, may be as far removed from ideas 
as earth from star, and yet preach effectively. To take 
an instance of renown, I mention Whitefield. He was 
not a man of ideas. He did not possess a power of 
putting things attractively as Emerson or Ruskin or 
Renan. There is no witchery of thought, no aureole 
of poetry in fact or suggestion, and yet he was the 
mighty preacher. He was not in the same hemisphere 
of depth and knowledge as Wesley, and yet as between 
the two we can not hesitate to name him the greater 
preacher. Whitefield’s power was purely the personal 
power. He was something that burned men like fire, 
that bent them like wind, that drove them like a sea 
wave. You could not hit on the secret. He had it, 
that was all. Partly it lay in voice; but voice is a part 
of this personal equation. He was magnetic, whatever 
that may be; for this word is a name we give to a se¬ 
cret. Some men tell us a thing, and we hear it: other 
men tell us a thing, and we feel it. There is the dis¬ 
tinction. Some men are logical engines, calculating 
machines: others breathe on our souls, and they rise to 
meet the breath as flowers do to meet the breathing of 
the wind of spring. Patrick Henry was a pronounced 
instance of the personal power. He exhaled might. 
84 


THE SECRET OF EFFECTIVE PREACHING. 


He caught men, and they could not get from him. He 
snared them with a charm. They did not so well re¬ 
member his words as they remembered him. He was 
the dynamic thing. He was the whirlwind in whose fierce 
goings forests are frivolities. This is the unimpartable 
thing. No dynamo can generate this power. Men are 
born with it or bom without it, that is all we may say. 
No teaching of oratory is other than mechanical; but 
this secret is always dynamical. Here we place Durbin, 
and at his best Foster. In neither can any one explain 
the how of the deluge of his might, save to say there 
was a deluge. This element of effective preaching hides 
itself as stolidly as the lightning hides its secret. 

S. The Character Element. Hearers feel the 
man. His manliness speaks above his voice. His mes¬ 
sage is surcharged with himself. The bigness of a 
soul imparts bigness to the voice. I have inquired of 
many who were stanch admirers of Phillips Brooks as 
to the secret of his preaching, urging, when they said 
such a sermon had profound effect on them, why did it 
have? And they have not been able to answer. Voice, 
torrent of words, hugeness of physical size, wealth of 
ideas.? Not these. But the last word they would give 
would amount to this, “The man; we felt him.” He 
drove through our veins like a bolt of fire. He was the 
sermon. A great heart engaged in a great business, is 
what this simmers down to. And this power in preach¬ 
ing is not like the former element, unacquirable. It 
can be had. The first, men are bom with or they have 
it not; this second, men are not bom with, save in em¬ 
bryo, but acquire. The blessing of a great heart is 

85 


THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


to be had for the hunt. They that hunger and thirst 
after a brave, strong, engaging nature shall be filled. 
This was in large part, too, I think, the secret of John 
Hall. The man walked into the heart. And beyond 
peradventure this is a beautiful effectiveness. Some 
men are heard and admired by forgetting what small 
souls they are. Their words come from the lips out. 
Burr illustrates this, and certain men known to political 
fame, not polite to name. But the preachment of char¬ 
acter is one of the holiest forms and most praiseworthy. 
Here men become more equal than in the lands of ge¬ 
nius. Genius is not under control. We are bom in 
certain parallels of latitude; but in character we take 
our latitude with us as we march. Effective preaching, 
then, is in part an effective man. A man may be thor¬ 
oughly, detestably bad and have the first secret of might, 
as Mirabeau, as Fox. This second is a moral might,, 
purely, {. ^ot religious, necessarily, but certainly moral. 1//^. 
It was the might of William Pitt: it was the might of 
Washington. \The solid, sublime might of character.)/*^ 
It was the might of Grant. A noble soul standing be- ‘ ^ 
hind the words and acts. Put this noble soul into the 
pulpit and give him the message of the truth of God, 
and he becomes like a burning bush, a thing to hold 
men on the ground and fill them with unsubdued won¬ 
der. I would place Charles Kingsley here, and Hugh 
Latimer and Cardinal Newman and Bishop Ninde and 
Bishop Asbury. The men were sermons which com¬ 
pelled hearing and advance. 

3. The Hortatory Power. This is the Metho¬ 
dist exhorter’s might. What it is we can not name. 

86 



THE SECRET OF EFFECTIVE PREACHING. 


It is the revivalist gift, the art of impelling men to 
action. This is why I am of the opinion that we should 
not by flippant suggestions make light of the profes¬ 
sional revivalist. His is a distinct gift, the gift of 
urgency, the art of pushing men into action. Some 
men have it to a phenomenal degree. It was so with 
Moody. It is so with Harrison. That nervous, agile, 
variable man has in God’s hands led as many business 
men to Christ as probably any living man. Some of 
these men can preach much, some little, but that is be¬ 
side the question. They can push men to decision for 
God. I have known some ministers ignorant, jocose in 
their misappropriation of words and ideas, and yet 
they had this blessed power of crowding men over to 
God’s side of the road. Bishop McCabe had it. I have 
always been sorry he had not been an evangelist all 
these years. Bishop Joyce had it. Charles B. Mitchell 
has it. Louis Albert Banks has it. Dr. Goodell has it. 
For the man who has it I have plaudits long and loud. 
Our former missionary secretary. Peck, had this. His 
book on revivals (pastoral) seems to me the best book 
on that theme written to date, but, for all that, com¬ 
municates not the real secret. This is how we may ac¬ 
count for some bad men who have had power in re¬ 
vivals. God did not own their badness, but used their 
gifts of urgent appeal; and I have no doubt that many 
men and women have been led to God by bad men, and 
led to sound conversion because of this power of push 
on the soul so as to drive it to the resolution which 
brings to God. Blessed is he who has this gift. 

4. The Power of Ideas. This gift conduces so 
87 


THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


greatly to upbuilding. This is evident in Robertson of 
Brighton, Theodore Hunger, Joseph Parker, Charles 
Parkhurst, Bishop Fowler, Beecher. They make re¬ 
ligion engaging, notable. They stir the soul. They 
dig deep into men’s larger life. They create distances, 
or seem to. They sting us with the wonder and the 
weight of divine possibility in us. Nothing can be 
more solid in contributing to a religious growth than 
the pouring thoughts of holy things into the soul. We 
build on these and with these. They make for right¬ 
eousness. We become cumulative. Stimulation is char¬ 
acteristic of this type of gospel dispensing. We get 
to be like ships heavily freighted with the things of 
God. There is here no sense of limit put on God or 
the gospel. Here is a secret whose possession may be 
striven for. Preachers may say something, may bring 
a mood of God into the heart through the importation 
of an idea. Not saying kind things about goodness, 
but big things about God and His methods with the 
world. 

5. Sincerity. This would be illustrated in Spur¬ 
geon and Dr. Cuyler. Neither of these is a vendor of 
ideas, but with manly directness and beautiful consist¬ 
ency urges religion, urges it consecutively, with no 
get-atable secret, but that they believe God and work 
to get others into like heavenly frame. 

6. Affirmativeness. Negationists I do not note 
as getting anywhere. The effectiveness of preaching is 
the preaching of positive things found and received 
and believed. emphasis on certaintie^ The froth¬ 
ing little, but bringing bread, the bread of heaven. 

88 


THE SECRET OF EFFECTIVE PREACHING. 


7. Consecration and Prayer. To upbuilding 
this is essential. The hold on God, the walk in the light, 
the fellowship with the Christ, the hallowed seclusion 
with the Holy Ghost, the power of prayer, the bringing 
men into the presence of God through the unknown phi¬ 
losophy of prayer, that counts. Our sure work for 
God must be done in the presence of the God for whom 
work is done. Christlikeness does more in the sum to¬ 
tal than all things beside to build the lives of men 
into the life of God. More men are working at this 
point than any other. We may have the God might 
in the heart. It is a secret, we ourselves can know in 
God’s good providence. We may firmly believe that to 
that minister of the Cross who holds tight to God 
there will be an honored showing on the Day of God. 
The secret of His presence is the thing for which all 
may make prayer and to which all may have answer, 
and to such there will be a sure, though maybe un¬ 
seen, fruitage of help to man in the cure of souls. 

8. Love of Men. That was a sure source of 
Jesus’ power, and so may be of ours. The steady, 
honest love of souls is effectiveness. And this may be 
our joy. We are common, not uncommon, men; and 
by loving men we may become eflScient. They need 
this love, and we have this love to give. All may pos¬ 
sess it. A genuine interest in men, not because they 
possess some ingredient which meets our need or ap¬ 
proval, but because they are men for whom Jesus died, 
is the legitimate ground for this love which avails and 
prevails. 

9. Great Truths. The enunciation of great 

89 


THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


truths, or if you will, of greatest truths, is to go far 
on the way to effective preaching. Let people know 
that religion is the realm of greatest ideas. Show what 
shock they must have had for minds fronting them for 
the first time. Keeping hearers steadily informed of 
eternity, God, Christ, salvation by faith, the atonement, 
the divinity of Christ, the personality and power of the 
Holy Ghost, the absoluteness of the right of God to 
ourselves and our services, the freedom of the soul, the 
independency of heredity and environment specially by 
the grace of God, the love of God, the exaltation of 
man in the gospel—^these and kindred themes attempted 
make for power. And then an enunciation, a thought— 
the secret is still in hiding. The search, howbeit, must 
be mightily on all who would preach the Christ, 


90 


The Preacher and Sermonic Literature. 

A FEEBL.E poetaster once said to this writer, “I do 
not read poetry—I write it.” He was a joke, but, of 
course, did not know it. Jokes do not classify them¬ 
selves. 

Any man engaged in any department of activity 
should be familiar with what others in his business have 
thought, said, and done. The musician owes it to him¬ 
self to know what his confreres have done. What the 
masters have wrought is of consequence to a craftsman. 
What a witless painter it would be who would not look 
at any canvas any of the mighty men had touched into 
immortality. Yet not more witless he than the preacher 
who does not familiarize himself with the sermons the 
Boanerges-men of his vocation have preached. 

One of the preacher’s inevitable disabilities is that 
he can so seldom hear his brethren preach. On each 
Lord’s day he himself is preaching, and could not hear 
Paul or Chrysostom or St. Bernard or Bushnell or Jon¬ 
athan Edwards or Matthew Simpson, were they preach¬ 
ing in his town. How very often has every preacher 
been at the point of heartbreak because he could not 
hear some great preacher preach, solely because at the 
same time he must proceed with his own preaching. 

As appears to me, every sermonizer should use every 
occasion possible to hear his brother ministers preach. 
91 


THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 

He should listen to them in a receptive mood. If he 
comes with a critic’s mien, then he would far better 
not come at all. No preaching will do a critic good. 
He is immune to the reception of good. If a preacher 
goes to hear another preacher preach so as to bolster 
up his own opinion of himself and so minister to self- 
opinionation, then he is not only violating a Christian 
propriety, but he is distinctly crude. To compare 
others with one’s self to the other’s hurt is a mean 
thing and fails both in fine feeling and in educative 
propriety. There are proprieties in listening to other 
preachers, and all of them may be summed up in this— 
listening as we would be listened to. What choice audi¬ 
tors that would make of all of us. A preacher who 
owes so much so continuously, to the forbearance of 
his own hearers, should himself be a good listener. I 
deprecate the mood of preachers, younger or older, to 
play the critic with every preacher they hear, and won¬ 
der if the critical spirit of training-schools for proph¬ 
ets, wherein they are in danger of listening to preachers 
very much less for profit than for discovery whether 
they violate some professorial propriety, be not minis¬ 
ter to the fault-finding mood so often evidenced when 
other preachers are listened to. Paring sermons down 
to the quick, fails in rightness. What the sermonic 
plan was is less than immaterial. Such as seek shelter 
from a storm are not given to criticising the architec¬ 
ture of the building which aflPords them the desired 
shelter. So with a sermon which by whatever route ar¬ 
rives, and its arrival brings passengers, is a valid ser¬ 
mon and, what is more, a valuable sermon. 

92 


PREACHER AND SERMONIC LITERATURE. 


This writer has found listening to his brother min¬ 
isters one of the strongest delights of his life. When 
he can at hours of Sunday afternoon or week days hear 
his brethren, be they men of larger esteem in the Church 
or slighter esteem, he thinks it brotherly to be present 
and profitable to be present. The few inches in stature 
by which a so-called great preacher differs from a so- 
called not great preacher is literally a few inches. The 
last few feet of a mountain’s height are those which 
lift the range above the snow-line, but the real altitudes 
differ only a few feet. The stature of preachers varies 
not greatly, certainly not so greatly but that any 
preacher may be greatly benefited in both brain and 
heart by hearing any brother preacher preach. 

This word “preacher” does not include “ranter,” 
a “lambaster” of Churches, although in hearing such 
there comes a return of help in that it warns the listen¬ 
ing minister and keeps him from those reefs on which 
many break, namely, the reef of the ranter and the 
abuser of Churches. We may listen to such, thank¬ 
ing God we are not so, and by hearing this series of 
gasoline explosions will be guarded against being so. 

Every humble minister of Jesus Christ who honestly 
wants to help the world toward God, is well worth hear¬ 
ing. If he is learned he will bring knowledge, if un¬ 
learned he wiU bring a degree of shrewd and homely 
observation and exegesis of his own which will be heart¬ 
ening and refreshing. A single phrase will set the soul 
out into the sunlight. In Dr. Claudius B. Spencer’s 
“Easter Meditations,” one phrase—and there are many 
such—but one phrase, made the day I read that book 


THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


a day worthy of recollection: “Pie (Christ) fitted 
death into the scheme of things.” This is very noble; 
and I have found in hearing many brethren pray a 
phrase of sublimity and simplicity, and simplicity in 
sublimity, firing their hearts, which in turn would set 
me far on the holy road of dream or swing me as with 
a giant’s arm out into the holy neighborhood of God. 

Intellectually and spiritually it pays to hear one’s 
brethren preach. One Sunday in New York I heard 
Dr. Burrell, Dr. Jefferson, and Dr. Hillis. How spa¬ 
cious the habitation of that Lord’s day. And now, as 
I think over men I have listened to, some of them now 
gone into the Paradise of God, and recall the sound of 
their voices and the lightnings of their thought, how 
I bless God for them. The simple sound of the voice 
of a brother minister—that itself does good. We 
preachers grow so tired of the drone of our own voices 
that to hear a brother minister’s voice is like retuning 
an instrument. To see how other preachers preach, 
their cross-cuts, their wide circuits, their latencies, their 
rush out into the open, all these put us under listening 
obligation to our ministerial brethren. Blessed are good 
listeners, just as blessed are good preachers. 

To attend a preachers’ meeting is a wise investment 
of time if such a meeting be accessible, because we not 
only meet brethren and so grow to love them, but we 
hear many views and catch the sound of many voices 
and gather numerous suggestions and catch a clue to 
many mental mazes and learn what is of inestimable 
worth to each of us, namely, that good men may differ 
very widely and still be good and true. We shall be 
94 


PREACHER AND SERMONIC LITERATURE. 


less dogmatic as to method, but more deeply grounded 
in the everlasting righteousness. 

But even at the manliest effort possible a preacher 
can not hear many of the masters of audiences, and 
so is driven to reading after them. Sermon books are 
well worth reading. They constitute a distinct form 
and, I think, a valued form of literature. I have found 
a constant and, if possible, growing delight in them., 
To see which way the leading preachers of the gen¬ 
eration are looking and leading gives a safety to one’s 
own spiritual forecast. And so as not to be browbeaten 
by a superficial age spirit he should read the master 
preachments of the ages. The sermons of all mighty 
preachers should be read and studied. Each preacher 
reader will find himself appealed to more by one than 
by another. This is to be expected. One preacher 
will ^sting ^one brain tp^^sitiye^exultation; another will 
not stir his brain to a ripple. But that depends much 
on ourselves. We are we; they are they. I myself 
have never been greatly appealed to by Spurgeon, 
though having read sermons of his by the hundred, and 
having heard him in his London pulpit. But so many 
of my manliest brethren, wiser than I, have been greatly 
helped by him, I do not fault him. I read him, rejoice 
in his call to man, and take my crumb thanking God 
for him. So have I not been intellectually stimulated 
by Phillips Brooks, but am graciously aware of his man¬ 
liness, his persistency in talking to larger issues, and 
his passion for man and God. While he does not bring 
my thought into resurrection, he helps me. I am I. 
Certain men will stimulate me more, certain less, but all 
95 


i 


THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


some: and I will rejoice in them all. Robertson and 
Beecher have their way with me. Both bring insight, 
but Beecher, by his oceanic quality, makes me feel a 
Shakespearian personality in that he is exhaustless. 

As I look through my library and see the sermonic 
collection, I am profoundly grateful to the great God 
of versatility, who has made of one intellectual blood 
all brains in this wide world, and yet has made such 
variegation. Guthrie and Chalmers are wide apart, and 
Liddon and Watkinson are far apart, and Bushnell and 
Simpson are wide apart. And shall we fault this.f^ 
Why, certainly we shall not, if we possess a germ of 
preacher fiber. They are all gospel values. 

Read the mighty preachers—that is the advice. 
Read widely. To see what themes the generations of 
voice have pressed before living men for their girding 
will be in itself a justification for the time used. Then, 
to see how the mighty orators have handled God’s mat¬ 
ters will unconsciously qualify us to be strong, and not 
flabby. Such reading will suggest texts, and not treat¬ 
ments. The safety in reading sermons is reading many 
sermons, because by the how much we are impressed 
with the style of one we shall be impressed by the 
style of another, and so our own preacher-personality 
shall stay unimpaired. It is a dangerous thing to 
read after one preacher, one book. Unconsciously we 
shall be bitten into by the acid of his personality, 
whereas we must have fealty to ourselves. 

But to read South and Wesley and Selby and Parker 
and Watkinson and Bushnell and Robertson and Nicoll 
will take us into many fields of thought and by many 
96 


PREACHER AND SERMONIC LITERATURE. 


highways of approach, and shall supply us with many 
atmospheres for breathing and enjoying. Jowett, 
Campbell, Dawson, Campbell Morgan, Storrs, Moody, 
Charles Jefferson, Bishop Fowler, Bishop Andrews, 
Durbin, Olin, Gunsaulus, why not listen to these men, 
these brawny men of the kingdom of God ? They 
have been with God and learned of Him. They know 
in what quarter of the heavens the eternal stars are set, 
and they know where to look for soul sunrise and 
where the grievous heresies of soul are hid along the 
highway of the soul. They know things, and want the 
heavenly order to be ushered in which we preachers, one 
and all, need to know and want to know and God 
wants us to know. 

Prayee. 

Great Master of all preachers and preaching, pre¬ 
pare our hearts to hear all men who take Thy holy 
name upon their lips, so that while they speak there 
may rise on us the gospel glory and through our hearts 
may blow the heavenly winds full of every spring growth 
and bloom, we pray in Christ. Amen. 


7 


9T 



The Trivialities of A Preacher’s Craft. 


Though when we come to think of it, there are no 
trivialities to great industries. The littles become large 
when attached to largenesses. Nothing is trivial about 
a passenger train because everything is related to safety 
in speedy transit. The engineer and conductor are no 
more important than the section hand and the tester 
of the wheels. Safety, the glad arrival, the meeting 
those for the meeting of whom the heart is hungry, 
the transit of continents, the despatch of business, 
these all inhere in every servant of the railway doing 
his exact duty. 

Everything pertaining to a preacher is momentous, 
seeing himself in his relation to society and individuals 
is so momentous. A preacher’s coming is to many a 
heart like the advent of God. Therefore his smallest 
activities are severely important. Recalling how trifles 
may mar, we may readily see how trifles make. A little 
thing, some cheap discrepancy, may shut a pastor off 
from access to some soul. Therefore is his least re¬ 
lated to his largest. The getting close to any life’s 
need is not small, but is the greatest deed in this great 
world. And any preacher may well weigh with prayers 
and tears how he may so clothe his entire life with such 
demeanor as shall commend him for Jesus’ sake to the 
most and damage him with the fewest. He is to re- 
98 


TRIVIALITIES OF A PREACHER’S CRAFT. 


member how he is God’s man sent to minister to God’s 
other men, and so failure in the very least is very venal. 
He may not glibly ^‘offend those for whom Christ died,” 
as is the setting the greatest human preacher has given 
to this aspect of the preacher’s career. 

Suppose we consider a preacher’s pulpit behavior 
prior to and subsequent to his sermon. Of course, the 
sermon and the public prayer are the culminations of 
his ascent into the pulpit, but there are many items in 
this same pulpit etiquette. 

1. He Must Come Into the Pulpit Unhurried. 
To come into the pulpit flurried, to be apparently be¬ 
hindhand, and come to the pulpit, so to say, puffing, 
deranges the entire scheme of the minister’s ritual. He 
must come promptly, yet without haste. He must have 
calm on him. If he blew in like a puff of delayed wind, 
the entire business will naturally partake of his flurry: 
whereas, the church is a house of peace. The services 
may legitimately end in a storm, a rush of voices, and 
a clamor of sobs; but the service should begin in quiet. 
The preacher’s calm should communicate itself to his 
congregation. 

2. He Must Be Absolutely on Time. He would 
do well to come into his pulpit during the playing of 
the organ prelude or, if he have not that, at the ex¬ 
act time for the service to begin. Not before time, but 
certainly not behind time. Never behind time. The 
minister must be as accurate in his schedule as a fast 
mail train. To be dilatory, “just a little late,” is an 
unforgivable misdemeanor in a minister. He must not 
be abrupt, but he must be punctual. He comes into 

99 



THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


his pulpit with an exactitude which will insensibly com¬ 
municate itself to the finer type of people, if not to all 
of the people. The minister’s promptitude will evoke 
theirs. 

3. He Will Be on Time, But not before Time. 
The minister’s ascent into his pulpit will be exact, but 
not previous. This will fit into the machinery of a 
perfect service. If he is in the pulpit too soon, it gives 
the impression that when the service does not begin 
there is something amiss, that he is delaying for some 
cause to them unknown, which will naturally set men 
to consulting their watches; and that is a chief mis¬ 
fortune in the house of prayer. Time should not be 
thought of while a congregation waits in God’s pres¬ 
ence. The preacher’s entrance, therefore, being ex¬ 
actly timed, on time, but not before time, the service 
will in fact as well as in theory be led by him. 

4. Once in the Pulpit, Remain There. This 
coming to his pulpit at the exact time will prevent him 
from a misdemeanor in pulpit ministration; to-wit, run¬ 
ning down from the pulpit and seeming to be looking 
up many matters which should have been looked after 
before. The semi-crazy and altogether loose way which 
some have of flinging themselves from the pulpit, tramp¬ 
ing all round the church, giving the impression of be¬ 
ing errand-boy in a hasty messenger service, is repre¬ 
hensible in the extreme. It detracts so from the calm 
of the place and time, and gets an audience fidgety as 
the preacher. If the preacher finds something needing 
doing immediately, let him, without ostentation, sum¬ 
mon an usher, who will do the needed thing. Unless 

100 


TRIVIALITIES OF A PREACHER’S CRAFT. 


for the purpose of seeing that some aged or infirm per¬ 
son is seated well to the front, or of greeting a brother 
minister and inviting him into the pulpit, a minister 
should seldom descend from the pulpit before service 
nears conclusion. This regimen for his own conduct 
will readily set his habits to methodicality, so that he 
will seldom find himself to have forgotten anything nec¬ 
essary to the right conduct of his church services. We 
are such ready controllers of our own activities. 

5. The Avoidance op Nervousness. As he should 
remain in the pulpit, so should he remain quiet in the 
pulpit. Nervousness, the moving restlessly about, the 
fingen^ng announcements as if he were a news-collector, 
the tumbling books about, and the like, impair a service 
seriously. It is a wise thing for a minister early Sun¬ 
day morning, before any one is about the church, to 
come to his desk and arrange any books and papers 
he may find it necessary to have about him, and place 
all ready for his hands when he shall later come before 
the audience. Let him find his psalter lesson, locate 
the hymns for the day, and mark them so he will not 
need to look them up later and have the rustle and 
haste of feverish quest. These minor details all help 
more than one might think to give the service a wor¬ 
shipful mien. Thus, when the preacher does come in 
the presence of his congregation, he may have no func¬ 
tion save to reverently open God’s Book and find the 
lesson he will use that day. 

6. He Will Be Devout. On entering the pulpit 
he should first of all kneel in prayer, if that be the 
posture of worship in that denomination; but his rest 

101 


THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


in God, his devout demeanor as he approaches the 
mercy seat, his unfeverish approach to the God of his 
own soul as he comes to minister in holy things, will 
be fitting who he is and where he is, as well as touch¬ 
ing the congregation with the spirit of the house— 
the “house of prayer for all nations,” as it was defined 
by Jesus in a definition which truly needs no revision 
forever. Attune the waiting company to the mood of 
prayer, a silent, wistful looking toward God by your 
own silent looking toward Him. So shall the hour 
have sacred beginning. 

7. A Rule foe Pulpit Manners. The preacher 
has need of his chastest manners in the presence of his 
people on the Lord’s day. Here his breeding will come 
into play. What the people of best manners would be 
offended at are the things to avoid. What attracts at¬ 
tention to a minister as being an uncouth demeanor is 
a misfortune, inasmuch as it distracts attention and 
brings thought to something other than the business of 
the hour, which is to worship the Living God. Clear¬ 
ing the throat in public is gross. Persons of breeding 
can not tolerate such procedure. A quiet graciousness 
of comportment in the pulpit will leave the way open 
to have most access to all who are present. The look¬ 
ing round on the congregation as if one were nervous 
lest the crowd would not be large, is to be avoided. The 
preacher is to preach to such as come, and not to play 
usher for such as come. He must be above the cheap 
feverishness of the size of a crowd. When a man 
seems to be creature of a crowd, then is he lost in the 
estimation of the best character and intelligence of his 
102 


TRIVIALITIES OF A PREACHER’S CRAFT. 


Church; but he has become cheap in his own soul, which 
is a crying calamity. A preacher’s eyes may kindly 
glance along the faces of his flock to note if any of 
his beloved lambs be absent; but this is not the quest 
of restless eyes, but the quest of eyes of love, the 
mother-eyes the preacher has in his heart. 

8. The Announcements. These may be a bug¬ 
bear, and often are, but need not be at all. If the 
Church publishes a Sunday bulletin, then the pastor 
should avoid announcing items included in such bulle¬ 
tin. When the members ask him to announce by voice, 
except in rarely important instances, let him say that 
so long as the bulletin is published one announcement 
would need to suffice. This attitude will gain the ap¬ 
proval of the members in bulk. It is cheap for a 
preacher to become a prattling dealer out of announce¬ 
ments. Sometimes one may hear a preacher go lengthily 
over with his voice what is before everybody’s eyes in 
the bulletin. This, of course, is a work of foolish su¬ 
per err ogation. If he is going to do that, let the pub¬ 
lication of the bulletin be discontinued. Few things 
are so disheartening as the hearing interminable an¬ 
nouncements specially from the preacher. His voice be¬ 
comes cheap when used in this business. Any voice could 
do as well as his own. I am not unapprised that Beecher 
made his own announcements betimes, and I have heard 
Talmage do so; but not these names convince my 
judgment. If no Church bulletin is published, then 
let the pastor appoint a Church secretary, who shall 
make the announcements. This is discreet and fitting, 
and works admirably well, and relieves the pastor’s 
103 


THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


mind of things irrelevant to the pronouncement of the 
hour. To be in mortal fear that some announcement 
may be omitted is poor preparation for the preaching 
of the sermon. But if for any reason the pastor does 
make announcements, let him pare them down both in 
number and in length. Let him not maunder along 
with all sorts of announcements of all sorts of lengths. 
People grow weary and used to his voice before he 
begins his sermon. Brevity will cover all points in an¬ 
nouncements. Time is of great value in a preaching 
service. A congregation ought not to be worn out 
before the intellectual occupation of the hour is intro¬ 
duced. Neither let the preacher be prolix in announce¬ 
ments, nor let him allow the secretary to be prolix. 
Brevity is the soul of announcements, whether it is of 
wit or not. But this word may well leave an impres¬ 
sion on the preacher, whoever he may be. His voice 
should be as little in evidence as possible in the service 
save in the prayer and sermon. There is a real sur¬ 
prise in a preacher’s voice, however often it is heard, 
if he will hold it for prayer and preaching. Bring the 
voice to men like a discovery. 

9. The Scripture Lesson. It is assumed that 
the psalter will be used in responsive reading, which is 
always wise. To have a multitude hear their own voices 
in the reading of God’s Holy Word is good for them 
and has strange, strong music for a pastor’s ears. It is 
inspiring after the manner, though not in the degree, of 
congregational song. Then, in selecting a New Testa¬ 
ment lesson, let the pastor bear this in mind, that no 
audience will remember long passages of Scripture. To 
104 


TRIVIALITIES OF A PREACHER’S CRAFT. 


read a long Scripture lesson is not psychological. But 
to get a Scripture which bums some single tmth on 
the heart, a congregation may be tmsted to get that 
and will listen to that. Long lessons they will not listen 
to. I have studied crowds when ministers were proceed¬ 
ing with great diligence, but small dispatch, through 
a long chapter, and have uniformly found that the 
people were not attent. I heard Spurgeon go through 
a long chapter with his common-sense comments, but 
even then the case was not other than has been stated. 
Psychology is to be taken into living account by all 
such as deal with the democracy called mankind. One 
divine truth urged home in a brief Scripture will do 
more good than a long chapter wearied through to which 
a scant handful give heed. 

10. The Hymns. The reading of the hymns uni¬ 
formly done is best done by not doing. This, of course, 
in the judgment of one man. The reading of hymns 
arose when few had books or none had books and the 
hymns were ‘‘lined.” Now, when every member of the 
congregation has before his eyes the selfsame lines as 
the preacher, why should he read.^ As this writer be¬ 
lieves, it is a custom best observed in the breach. If 
a person chances to be a reader of extraordinary grace 
and power, then it might be admissible, though even 
then a hymn read occasionally will prove odds more 
effective than every hymn read because—why, because 
of no cause. It takes time and brings scant results. 
If any one will take the pains to notice his auditors as 
he proses through the hymns, he will note the unani¬ 
mous inattention, which should cause him to mend his 
105 


THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 

ways and omit what has no particular cause for ex¬ 
istence. 

11. The Collection. Few items in a service are 
more generally botched than the item of the collection. 
Few things have wider variety of administration than 
the collection. It can be made and should be made 
an integral and gracious part of the Sunday program 
for God’s house. The customary remark is, ‘‘The 
morning offering will now be taken,” which seems a 
mild remark. Often, very often, there is a harangue 
about giving largely, and making a silver offering, and 
a whole lot more to the same effect. The truth is, all 
this is unnecessary and non-productive. The less said 
about the Sunday collection the better and the more 
worshipful. It is worshipful to take and make an of¬ 
fering to the Lord. Paul found nothing incongruous 
in speaking about the collection on the conclusion of 
one of the most brilliant bursts of eloquence known to 
the history of oratory; but by integrating the collec¬ 
tion with the worship, is this real unity discovered. To 
always remark about the collection is like making con¬ 
tinual observations on anything, the theme grows stale, 
is expected as a part of the dose, and has no eflPect. 
The beautiful way for the collection, is to have the col¬ 
lectors trained so that without word from the pastor’s 
lips they will at the right moment come forward. At 
the time for the offering the pastor will come from the 
pulpit, take his stand within the chancel, at which sign 
the collectors will come forward. The pastor will hold 
the collection plates, and as the collectors arrive at the 
chancel they and he will bow the head, he will say 
106 


TRIVIALITIES OF A PREACHER’S CRAFT. 


grace over the proposed gift to God, pass to each col¬ 
lector the plate, and thus without a single strident note 
the congregation to the last child has had attention 
called to the fact that the offering will now be made 
to the God whose the Church is and whose they are; 
and the collection will be as large by this means, in 
experience, as can be had from any given audience. 
Some pastors offer the prayer subsequent to the col¬ 
lection; but this is unpsychological in that it does not 
focus the attention of the company on the fact that an 
offering is to be taken. The collection, in other words, 
comes on them as a surprise, and loses money, and cre¬ 
ates a flurry among those who want to give and did 
not anticipate the offering then. This loses time in the 
service; and the loss of time is a mistake. The sooner 
the minister can begin his sermon the better for the 
sermon. Haste without rush is always desirable in the 
procedure of the church services. 

12. The Choice of Hymns. Here many a min¬ 
ister makes a gross mistake. He either leaves the choos¬ 
ing of the hymns to the choir leader or he leaves the 
choice of hymns till the last minute and selects them 
in the pulpit. This is shameful. The singing is so 
gracious a part of the church life that no minister can 
pay too much heed to it. He may not be able to con¬ 
trol the special music of the choir (if he tries to, he is 
likely to come to an early death) ; but the hymns he 
can control. No congregation, practically, will estimate 
the hymns above the estimation which their pastor places 
upon them. If he gives no weight to this beautiful 
section of the Lord’s day program, neither will they. 
107 


THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


A hymn-book is the depository of the devotion, first, of 
the whole Christian Church, and second, of the devotion 
of the special Church which has arranged this Hymnal. 
So that in any estimate in the hymnody of a Church is 
a strong stream of holy hope, praise, and prayer, which 
may well soak into the souls of all worshipers. Let the 
pastor, therefore, always select his own hymns and give 
them to the choir, and insist in a genial but authorita¬ 
tive way that they must be practiced; that each stanza 
of the hymn must be sung in this practice, because it 
is noticeable that unless such course is pursued some 
egregious blunders will be made even by a quartet. I 
have heard such not infrequently. Singers are better 
at reading notes than they are reading print; and be¬ 
sides, the squeeze which the meter often demands of 
the words requires that those who are to lead the con¬ 
gregation at song must familiarize themselves with each 
line to be used. The hymn-book music is great music, 
much of it, and the centuries have written it and sung 
it, and the melodies haunt the soul and ought to, and 
to render such noble music a familiar in every house¬ 
hold attending the Church to which a pastor may min¬ 
ister is, as I consider, a noble ministerial function. 

Let him suggest to the choir, be that choir large or 
small, paid singers or those who sing for the love of 
the Church, that the congregational singing is the chief 
singing done in the church. Quartets in particular will 
be slow to receive such doctrine of the music; but the 
preacher must be wise enough to know the relativity of 
things in Church life as no specialist in music can know 
them, and he must command the situation in its democ- 
108 


TRIVIALITIES OF A PREACHER’S CRAFT. 


racy. The congregational singing is a democratic ex¬ 
hibit of praise. The choir work is not. The choir is 
good; the congregation is better. Both must find fit 
place in the conventions of God’s house. 

Let the preacher select hymns and tunes. That is 
often given scant enough thought to. It is best, as a 
rule, to sing the hymn to the tune to which it is set in 
the Hymnal. Sometimes this may be changed, but let 
those times be seldom. Some preachers I have known 
would, if they selected hymns at all, leave the choice 
of the tune to the singers. This was a blunder, be¬ 
cause it ministers usually to a narrow range of music, 
since a choir will naturally use the tune which requires 
on their part least preparation. Besides, the music is 
very often as important as the words, v^ometimes more 
so. Let the preacher be familiar with every tune in 
his Church Hymnal. Let him have them played over to 
him so frequently that he will have the tunes of the whole 
book in his heart, and as he selects his Sunday hymns 
let him, if in any doubt, have the hymn played so that 
the effectiveness of the hymn as it stands may be fresh 
on his own spirit. A beautiful hymn just before the 
sermon is like the blowing in the face of a breath of 
spring-wind laden with the smell of growing things. 
Let the pastor ask the choir to use in their special sing¬ 
ing some of the noble pieces of melody which are in 
every denominational hymn-book. They can find no 
nobler. What can melt a heart more than “Margaret” 
or “St. Martins” or “Patmos” or “Rutherford” or 
“Ewing” or “The Homeland” or “Crossing the Bar” as 
set to Bamby’s blessed music, or Lutkin’s “Lanier?” 
109 


THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


These played or sung bring a benediction to the hearts 
of all who are under the drip of their hallowed per¬ 
suasion. The Methodist Hymnal is a treasury which 
no minister or Church can exhaust in a lifetime. The 
pastor who does not give large heed to its study is not 
wise. One of his least arduous duties and most im¬ 
portant is the getting his congregation into the midst 
of this noble chorus of melody and poetry. 

Let himself study variety in tunes in his selection of 
hymns for the days. If he does not keep for his use 
in his study a Hymnal, in which he notes the date and 
the service, night or morning, on which such a hymn 
was used, he will without knowing it be singing a few 
hymns over and over again and again, and so missing 
the wonder of the psalms the ages have sung. I have 
known congregations which did not sing more than 
thirty hymns in a year. That is wicked, straltly 
wicked. The whole is better than scattered parts. Ev¬ 
erybody will be enlarged by learning some new hymns. 
The enrichment of melody in the heart and poetry in 
the head is worth a manly effort. 

The selecting of hymns to fit the theme to the ser¬ 
mon seems to this minister a misapprehension of the 
case. A minister’s theme should not be prayed-through 
before he begins to preach, and no more should it be 
sung-through before he begins to preach. The sermon, 
text and treatment, should come as a surprise on the 
hearers. This is good psychology and good sense com¬ 
bined. To make Scripture and hymns and prayer bear 
on the sermon theme is to have the topic in a measure 
exhausted before the preacher touches it at all. A 
110 


TRIVIALITIES OF A PREACHER’S CRAFT. 


good plan on which to select hymns is for their effect on 
the congregation, the putting their hearts in devotional 
and receptive frame. Choose with regard to variety of 
music on any given day. Choose with regard to help¬ 
ful topic of the hymn-poem, but not with reference 
to the sermon topic. Singing, chaste, melting, or tri¬ 
umphant singing,—that is the thing to plan for and to 
consider. The hymn following the sermon may natu¬ 
rally and justly bear tenderly upon the thought the 
preacher has sought to enforce. But to have the music 
of the day upbear as on an eagle’s wings or, what is 
better, as on an angel’s wings, is worthy and very full 
of heavenly help. Let all the people sing, and let the 
pastor help them to sing, so shall he have become their 
benefactor. 

13. Preaching at People. Men are sent to preach 
to people, but never to preach at people. Of all cowardly 
things few can be placed in comparison with the using 
the pulpit to hit auditors a cowardly blow. A brainy and 
blessed preacher, made of the granite of Vermont from 
which he came, once remarked to a prayer-meeting, 
where it was the custom for some very good persons (in 
their own estimation, that is) to pray at the preacher 
instead of praying for him, that he wanted to be prayed 
for, but he did not want to be prayed at. He was just 
right. To get on a body’s knees to say a mean thing he 
would not dare to say on his feet is pusillanimous, but not 
so much so as for a preacher to hide behind his sacred 
desk to say cowardly and vicious things he would never 
dare to say on the street. I know one man who says he 
preaches, though he really abuses, who would have been 
111 


THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


a better man had he not been in the ministry, because he 
would have been hammered into being a gentleman had 
he not been protected by his calling. A few good maul- 
ings with some fist accustomed to speak straight English 
would have helped him toward being a gentleman. As it 
is, he has, under cover of preaching, raged at his members 
all but by name. This patently violates all proprieties of 
pulpit and of pew, and all the proprieties of gentility. 
Not infrequently men arise who think themselves brave 
when they are basely cowardly, saying insulting things 
which are applied and applauded by a coarse contingent 
which every 'city has as camp followers for the Church 
where the pastor is not a gentleman. Any preacher can 
catch the cheap cheer by being ungentlemanly toward 
those who pay him his salary, and the cheap hanger-on 
mil meet the preacher and greet him with, “Well, this 
city has one man who is not afraid to speak the truth;” 
whereas, what should have been said and would have 
been said had the truth been uttered, is, “Well, here 
is one fine specimen of a coward.” A man can say 
anything from a pulpit which should be said for the 
guidance and enlargement of his members if he will say 
it impersonally as regards the congregation, and speak 
with a kindness of heart which betokens a love he bears 
them, and not with a venom which betokens the vitriol 
he has for miscellaneous use. Be a gentleman from 
the pulpit, is a sane rule to follow. From such rule, 
lived up to, no harm can come. 

14. Neither Murmur Ye. This Scripture is 
specially salutary advice to any preacher. The com¬ 
plaining preacher is a good specimen of a humbug. He 
112 


TRIVIALITIES OF A PREACHER’S CRAFT. 

thinks of himself more highly than he ought to think, 
which is an admirable definition of an egotist. A 
preacher may well be definitely humble. No preacher 
is so strong a sermonizer, nor so marked a success, as 
to hurt him. He could be amended even by a resolu¬ 
tion. The attitude of humility is very fitting all such 
as speak for the meek Master of men, who commended 
meekness by His beautiful beatitude and by the still more 
beautiful beatitude of His life. A preacher’s ideal of 
his calling will pull him from any silly pedestal he may 
mount, if he apply his ideal. The proportions of his 
task set over against the measure of any minister’s do¬ 
ing of the task will put him on his knees and fill his 
heart with sobs. When a person thinks extravagantly 
well of himself it can not be that the members can meas¬ 
ure up to his own estimate of his talents; therefore is 
such a man a predestined faultfinder. His fusser'works 
and never tires. He, this minister, has been known to 
complain at a parsonage and at the salary, and if he 
be very far gone in the trespasses and sins of egotism 
he has been known to find fault with the women of the 
Church, and he rages if the prayer-meetings are not 
well attended, though what the attendants on that serv¬ 
ice are fed on when they come is complaints, which is 
rather a diet of husks. This brother on a rainy Sun¬ 
day harangues the blessed few who do come through 
the rush of the storm on the failure of those who did 
not come. This is silly as well as bad. Those who come 
on stormy days or nights have just right to the message 
of sweetness and power which the pastor has in him to 
deliver. Nothing is too good for a stormy-day crowd. 
8 113 



THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


A wise minister will be above the littleness of counting 
noses, anyway. He should go on and minister like a 
man to such as come, and be miles removed from ad¬ 
verting to the size of the crowd, but push out in holy 
courage to give those who are his auditors a message 
straight from the kind heart of God the Father. The 
preacher who complains is lost. He may get on. He 
may browbeat his people into a snarly silence. He may 
fool the few who are duped by egotism and noise, but 
the discerning many will not be deluded by him, but 
will be disgusted with him. 

15. The Appreciative Mood. This clearly is 
the antipodes of the former. It is the sunlight versus 
the windy cloud. A preacher should make a prayerful 
study of the appreciation of the difficulties under which 
persons. Churches, communities labor. He should hunt 
out the things he may praise. He should enjoy the 
landscape in his own neighborhood, the people in his 
own Church, and should cavil little. Censure requires 
a small brain and a wagging tongue, but to praise 
requires fine and systematic insight on a brother’s 
part. How gleeful any congregation is which finds it¬ 
self possessed of a pastor who enjoys them and their 
Church and their children and their way of doing 
things and their purpose for the blessing of the world 
through the Church, who enjoys their society; who every 
once in a while remarks: “I never enjoyed a people 
more than this one.” That will do more good than scold¬ 
ing, and is more in the mood of Christ. It is so cheap 
to browbeat a congregation, and so charming and manly 
to enjoy a congregation. I have in mind a man and 
114 


TRIVIALITIES OF A PREACHER’S CRAFT. 


his wife who are chaste in conversation, ^legant in cul 
ture, without obtruding it, delightful in^conversation;) 
beautiful in their sense of what is fit in homes and in 
the church house, who fall so in love with a people that 
the thought of breaking away from them breaks their 
hearts, who are so dear to their flock that the thought 
of their going breaks the hearts of the flock, and thus 
this preacher family lives in sunlight all the year 
through, from Conference to Conference, and their 
Church lives in the sunlight of such preacher folks all 
the year through, and their eyes grow wet when you 
speak of this preacher-man and this preacher-woman. 
Why, this is really heavenly. And this is as it should be. 
Not that all Churches are ideal, nor that any Church 
is ideal, but neither is any preacher ideal; and so the 
case is pretty even. Appreciation is a much surer way 
to rectify things imperfect than clumsy complaint. To 
point out a better way, one does not need to use the 
pointer for a gad. Usually the gentleman can get most 
work out of a team. This is every farmer’s experience. 
Jerking and whipping a team deranges their scant fac¬ 
ulties, though they have more gumption than their 
driver, but the gentle voice and the steady voice will 
get most labor from that best helper of human labor, 
the horse. And if a teamster who is a gentleman can 
do most work, how much more a preacher who is a 
gentleman, who speaks with a gentle voice of consider¬ 
ate love and laughs a little while the members work a 
lot. Blessed are those preachers who are swift to ap¬ 
preciate and slow to find fault. 


115 


Some Preacher “Nevers.” 


1. Never scold. 

2. Never count noses in prayer-meeting or Lord’s 
day service, because that begets wrong emphasis. What 
a pastor does with his crowd, be it large or small, is 
the thing of importance. The preacher is Christ’s man; 
and Christ preached to one man or one woman. Can 
any one sanely think of Jesus putting the question to 
some disciple after Jesus had concluded preaching, 
“How many do you think were present!’” Never be¬ 
come creature of a crowd. Be not bond servant to num¬ 
bers. 

3. Never say things to evoke the cheer. Say 
things which you think your Master would have you 
say at that time and to that people. It is pitifully easy 
to give way to the desire for applause; and he who does 
is lost. The crowd is mightier than he is; whereas, if 
he is to do men good, he must be mightier than the 
crowd is. 

4. Do not stew. That is a best word for what so 
many preachers mistake for being in earnest. Stewing 
is no sign of earnestness: it is a sign of lack of self- 
control and self-calm. 

5. Never fret. Do not wear your nerve fiber to 
the bleeding by chafing in your soul and maybe with 
your lips. For, what men have in the soul will usually 

116 


SOME PREACHER ‘‘NEVERS.” 


find way to their lips. Leaving issues in decisions till 
the time the decision must be made is a wise course, for 
the reason that so many things which seem to forebode 
distress never get to us. A fretful preacher will wear 
away his spirit in climbing hills which, if he would wait, 
will lift from before him like a mist. 

6. Never talk about the size of the crowd. If you 
do, others will, and so the emphasis be put amiss. 

7. Never allow yourself to seem nettled at any in¬ 
congruities in a service, or the disturbance of persons 
going out before service concludes, or the noise of chil¬ 
dren. To which some wise brother will inly reply, 
“That is all very well to talk; but how is a man to 
help it if he have nerves.?’’ Precisely there has the 
brother lit on his weak spot. His inference is that he 
is so finely strung that he gets upset by those disturb¬ 
ances which others, less finely built, would not notice. 
In other words, the brother is an unconscious egotist 
putting that in his make-up as a strength which is a 
weakness. He who is master of himself is the strong 
man, not he who goes to pieces at a touch of hand or 
voice. No preacher enjoys having babies cry while he 
preaches. That may be fun for the baby, but is hardly 
sport for the preacher. Said a fond mother to this 
writer one Sunday, after her two cheerfuls (?) had de¬ 
stroyed the service for a goodly number of people by 
a perfect tumult of angry crying, not meek and lady¬ 
like, but vociferous; for the mother was holding them 
down in the seat, as the minister during his ordeal noted, 
—said this fond mother, “I was bound they should not 
conquer me.” Lackaday, was n’t that hilarious ? That 

117 



THE PASTOR'PREACHER. 


was humor with a sting, but the sting was not for her. 
But, could a minister afford to have lost hold on him¬ 
self before that audience, and have discovered himself 
to be nettled? This writer thinks not. Self-control 
was more of an achievement than a sermon under those 
untoward conditions; and the audience (not the mother, 
surely not) knew it. 

8. Never preach at people, preach to them. 

9. Never multiply points of antagonism. In deal¬ 
ing with a crowd, find as many things on which you 
and they may agree as possible, and from this standing- 
ground make your message. 

10. Never grow hysterical. That is easy to do, 
and think that in so doing you are pious, whereas it is 
not piety which troubles you: it is hysterics. And hys¬ 
terics, while a frivolous form of amusement, are not 
things catalogued in the fruits of the Spirit. Speak 
against evils and for good, but do not allow yourself 
to get slushy about either. A preacher is a soldier; 
and crying at the sight of an enemy is not half so good 
a way to fight as to shoot the enemy. Being maudlin 
is not being devout. Let the preacher keep himself in 
good battle trim, and when the time comes he will smite 
like Grant and be intrepid as Wellington. 

11. Never abuse your members. Love them, care 
for them in their spiritual needs, be frank in the proc¬ 
lamation of truth to their souls, but be a gentleman and 
treat them as yourself would be treated were you mem¬ 
ber and they pastor. I knew a man who was shocked 
when he was accused of being abusive, and on being 
asked if he had said that there was a citizen of the 

118 


SOME PREACHER “NEVERS.” 


town who, when he weighed meat to his customers, left 
his hands on the scales and charged for the weight of 
hands and meat, he said he did not consider that per¬ 
sonal, because he had used no names. That kind of 
thing is scandalous; but that brother likely enough had 
been applauded by some unwise friend for saying just 
that kind of thing. He was applauded when he should 
have been upbraided by some wise friend. 

12. Never allow some other preacher, evangelist, 
or what not, to come into your pulpit and abuse your 
members. Protect them against that sort of indecency. 
It always occurred to this preacher that any company 
to which he customarily preached was good enough to 
be treated decently by any other minister; and on that 
he insisted. Calling gentlemen and ladies who do not 
happen to think that ejaculation is all there is of re¬ 
ligion “seat warmers” is abominable. It sins against 
all kinds of propriety, the propriety of man and of 
God. We have no call to belabor the lukewarm, but 
to labor with them and attempt by gracious suasion 
to lead them nearer to the Christ, who is so blessed 
that such as follow Him afar off are infinite losers. 

13. Never combat science. There is science falsely 
so called to which attention now and then must be called, 
and there are all sorts of active imaginations mistaking 
their wanderings for science; but science we may well 
heed. Do not run to head the processions of scientists, 
seeing you are not scientist, but preacher; but know that 
science will not be able to get away from God for long. 
Science is one of the mights of the human brain; and 
the pulpit is not called on to battle where there is no 

119 


THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 

fight. For instance, touching evolution. No Christian 
minister needs to combat that doctrine. To him it is 
entirely immaterial whether God made the world by 
slow processes which are evolutionary or by fiats. God 
made the world—that is the preacher’s contention, and 
for that he must stand. And when any person in the 
name of science would deny the validity of the doctrine 
of a God and would make this whole noble earth-frame 
a machine without a mechanic, and these folks upon 
this earth without a God, and so orphans, then may 
and then must the preacher do battle. He is to ‘‘con¬ 
tend earnestly for the faith once delivered to the saints.” 
But as to the mechanics of the creative plan he may 
have a preference, but seeing he is not God he can not 
control them. This single word of care will save many 
a preacher-man many a bootless battle. As to what 
case evolution has made after a half century of prac¬ 
tically undisputed ownership of the field, that is a ques¬ 
tion on which, as an intellectual man, the preacher has 
a right to a judgment; but it is purely an intellectual 
attitude. God is no more ruled out of this universe 
now than when Darwin in 1859 issued “The Origin of 
Species.” To be accurate, the doctrine of the unity 
of the source of this world and all worlds has never 
stood on so sound a basis. Science, without ever intend¬ 
ing it, has totally overthrown polytheism. “One God, 
one law, one element,” is the last word science has to 
utter. Materialism has died in the same lustrum or 
two of its birth. Let scientists go on, and let us ap¬ 
plaud them. We love their grit and their task, and, 
though often they do not, we love their God. 

120 


SOME PREACHER “NEVERS.” 


14. Never be afraid of truth. Consider the much- 
talked-of, the over-lauded, and the over-abused higher 
criticism. Legitimate criticism, and in the long run it 
will be that, can not overturn anything God has based. 
The mountains are not uprooted by the plow nor over¬ 
turned by the hurricane. Truth will stay and truth 
will stand. We preachers need not lay hands nervously 
on the ark. It is God’s ark; but we do well not to 
run to believe everything the sanguine say. Things true 
will abide: things untrue ought not to abide. The Bible 
has an odd way of staying. It allows itself to be de¬ 
stroyed with impunity. It has no apparent thought for 
self-preservation. All kinds of men have done it to 
death. Sapient critics have shot it fuU of holes and 
have cheered themselves in their unvalorous task; and 
then the Bible went straight on, gloriously on, sowing 
this world to light and laughter and hope and song 
and virtue and beauty and godliness. While the Bible 
was being destroyed, pared away by naturalists, sub¬ 
jected to injudicious and unfair tests by those who knew 
not its spirit nor had its experience, the Bible was pub¬ 
lished in more tongues, read by more eyes, leaned over 
by more hearts, thanked God for by more converts than 
in all the years past. Truth will not die. It will not 
say so, but smilingly it keeps on its immortal journey 
toward the heavenly house. God’s Word, God’s Church, 
God’s Day will stand while eternity stays on its feet. 

15. Never give the chief seat in the synagogue to 
some minor matter. The instance adverted to in the 
preceding paragraph will illustrate my meaning. Some 
well-meaning but nearsighted brethren thought they 

121 


THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


must go into the pulpit and say what Cheyne had said O' 
in his cyclopaedia about the Bible and its incoherence, 
and they thought that people needed that sort of pas¬ 
turage and gave it to them, and the people mainly 
listened and were amused because they saw these breth- ^ 
ren were funny, which the brethren themselves ha d not 
perceived. They had mistaken an insignificant fletaiL /' 
for the continent. Soul-hunger, the sense of sin, the 
need of God, the darkness of soul where Christ is not 
near to give the light, the terror of the battle almost 
every soul must carry on with itself, the preciousness of 
the Savior, the advent of God, the salvation by the 
Blood of God, the ministry of the Holy Ghost—these 
are the mighty and momentous matters, and instead of 
giving emphasis and heed to these torrential calls of 
human souls they driveled about the documents and one 
Isaiah and two, not perceiving that those things were 
really not very influential or eventful and were not the 
crux and never would be, where how a bad man shall 
become a good man, and how a debauched life shall have 
its sins forgiven, are tragical needs and can not wait. 
Emphasis was wrong, that was all. They had not the 
spiritual sagacity to discriminate between unessentials 
and essentials. Put second things second, is the creed 
of this entire type of circumstance. 

16. Never use the editorial “we” in preaching. 
Preaching is a personal message to lives, a man preach¬ 
ing to a man. To cloud the individuality of the speaker 
by saying “we think” when he plainly means “I think,” 
is not modesty: it is throwing dust around the person 
of the orator. He need not intrude himself in an in- 
122 


SOME PREACHER ‘‘NEVERS.” 


trusive way. He need not be giving ipse dixits with 
unctuous zeal: but, as seems to this writer, he may and 
he ought to let it be apparent that here is a man, one 
man, who has such and such thoughts about God and 
about man, and who loves in his own name both man 
and God. Directness is the glory and the power of 
preaching-utterance, and whatsoever impairs that direct¬ 
ness must in some measure maim effective proclamation 
of the gospel evangel. 

17. Never forget to pray for your people by name. 
A fruitful way to proceed is to take your Church rec¬ 
ord into your study and on your knees remember them 
one by one till you have remembered them all before 
God, recalling, as you pray, their needs, their cares, 
their graces, their weakness, their neglects, their glad¬ 
ness. It is blessed to consider how near this brings the 
flock to the heart of the shepherd. 


123 


The Sin of Being Uninteresting. 

The sin of being uninteresting is in a preacher an 
exceedingly mortal sin. It hath no forgiveness. 

The territory covered by the Bible is the most di¬ 
versified landscape thought ever viewed. Compare the 
history of Athens or of Rome with the history recorded 
from Genesis to Revelation, and those thrilling boasts 
of human grandeur and success become Insipid. “Grote’s 
Greece” and ‘‘Mommsen’s Rome” and “Gibbon’s Decline 
and Fall of the Roman Empire,” alluring and gigantic 
as those stories there recorded are, being in the case of 
Grote’s Greece a flowering of a race, and in the others 
the preponderance of the governing faculty, and then 
the desolation of them both, leave two splendors which 
are as a “twice-told tale vexing the dull ear of a drowsy 
man,” as Shakespeare phrases it, when the Bible history 
marches into view. 

With a story such as Gibbon had to recite he had 
no excuse for being tiresome. He was not. Verbose and 
ponderous as his style is, and mendacious as some of 
his views are, we still thrill to his narrative because an 
old drunken giant refuses to die and staggers on a 
thousand years past his death-day before he surlily sur¬ 
renders to the grave. Roman history, I would think, 
would thrill a dead brain into attention. I never read 
124 


THE SIN OF BEING UNINTERESTING. 


Mommsen, surcharged as it is with the vigor of the iron 
Roman will and genius for control in its young majesty 
of view and effort, and Gibbon with its bleak majesty 
of decay, that it does not make my mind the highway 
for the marches and declensions and defeat of that 
giant which was the one power which ever burlily at¬ 
tempted to rule the world. Rome’s spell is undeniably 
victorious. 

Yet, when we calmly consider the aspects of the 
Bible history, mark its claims of advance from the dim¬ 
ness of eternity until it finally swings away with eagles 
far off into the invisible glory of an eternity where Jesus 
of Nazareth is Lord of all, then is the soul conquered. 
There is no longer breath in us. We are on our knees. 
Eternity is our vista. All events of time and all sub¬ 
lime events of eternity are clamoring across our imag¬ 
ination and our admiration. What is there in human 
history, not contemplated and comprehended in the Bible 
landscape All the conquering races of the early world 
are there—Babylon, Nineveh, Egypt, Media, Persia, 
Syria, Rome, Greece (by a language and an infusion 
of thought)—these are all there. When Jesus was taken 
up on the pinnacle of the temple, and so viewed the 
kingdoms of this world and the glory of them, it was 
the devil who submitted that wide territory for his in¬ 
spection ; but in the Bible a roomier territory of a uni 
versal rulership is swung under our eyes. We become 
auditors of all eloquence and spectators of all spec¬ 
tacles earth has the genius to present. For fascination 
pure and simple no orator has vistas like the preacher— 
geographies, visions, superb speculations, eloquence, ex- 
125 


THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


pansive landscapes, poetries, marvelous things, tempo¬ 
ralities, eternalities, ethicalities, spiritualities, man’s 
wickedness, God, man and God brought together at a 
mountain’s foot named Sinai, man and God brought 
together at a mountain’s top. Calvary; what can be 
compared with the preacher’s proclamation.'^ He has 
all subjects, all time, all knowledge, all souls, all dreams, 
all futures, all stupendous issues, all man is and all God 
is, for an oration. We name his oration a sermon. He 
is orator for God. His auditors are men; his ministry 
is God; his theme is God’s mjercy to man and man’s 
love to God. 

If we cared to give heed to the orations of all time 
as history has named them and given a secretary to re¬ 
cord their words and note the themes of their tongues 
and lips, we shall discover the penury of their themes 
when set up beside the preacher’s theme. Demosthenes 
was antagonistic to Philip of Macedon, a man who 
^ediated ^empire as against Greek automony. Put at 
ms best, Demosthenes was orator for freedom. Cicero 
was orator for Rome against misrule, the miscarriage 
of justice, and the ignominy of being ruled by ruffians. 
Mirabeau was orator for an insane time, but for man 
as man against man as class. Edmund Burke was ora¬ 
tor for government by right and the democracy of rule. 
Patrick Henry was orator for a free man’s free chance 
to rule himself. Daniel Webster was orator for the 
larger as opposed to the lesser, for United States rights 
as opposed to States’ rights. Charles Sumner and Wen- 
- dell Phillips were orators for the rights of man uni¬ 
versal, the right of the human race. Gladstone was 
126 


THE SIN OF BEING UNINTERESTING. 


orator for Christian conscience in government in an 
age when foolish men dreamed eloquence had lost its 
spell. 

But the preacher as orator has all these themes. He 
lights his torch at all their fires, and then has a torch 
lit not by their flaring lamps, but at the sun, which 
sun is Christ. The preacher has all they had, and more 
—and more, aye, gloriously more! No interest vital 
to the world which he does not touch. He stands at 
the center of a circle whose entire rim is fire. Glory 
envelops him. He is a prisoner of majesty. A dumb 
man would stumble into luminous speech on such themes 
as the gospel grapples with. We dare not be inelo- 
quent when we have themes which do as Aaron’s rod 
did, burst forth into perfumed bloom. We must not be 
insipid. There is not a dull page in all this age-long 
story of the redeeming of the race. The minor prophets 
leap into eloquence which silences Demosthenes; and the 
major prophets take the thunders for a trumpet on 
which to blow their universal summons; and the apostles 
stand in the highwa}’^ where the peoples throng and 
exact a tribute of a hearing from the unconcerned; and 
the evangelists forgot bookkeeping and fishing, in elo¬ 
quence which time has not had the effrontery to dim. 

We preachers of this twentieth century are these 
men’s successors. We are not men of apathy; we are 
men vigilant in intent, who have the sky upon our shoul¬ 
ders and the round world in our hearts, and are bur¬ 
dened with a ministry which must be uttered lest we die, 
and, what is more of consequence, which must be ut¬ 
tered lest this wide world die. 

127 



THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


It is not meet that such as dwell in lightnings work 
in the dark like the blind moles; and they do not. When 
the dynamo inveigles lightning from the sky, those 
workers have the lightning’s torch to oil the machinery 
by. Even so the preacher, who has themes flaming 
bright beyond the lightnings, must not walk by twi¬ 
lights, He must be fascinating in his recitation of facts 
“which angels desire to look into.” 

The preacher must not drowse. The preacher must 
never drowse. He can at least be interesting. His 
theme is stimulative. His purpose is the changing of 
the atoms of the soul so that it swings in a new circle. 
He has his own heart strangely hot. Love girds him. 
The Christ applauds him. Eternity becomes his tutor. 
Heaven owns him as its ambassador. With him is God 
well pleased. A thousand points of fire leap along 
the horizon of his loving thought and design. He is 
the bare-handed, large-handed smith that hammers upon 
the anvil of the soul. How dare he be insipid, spiritless, 
lacking in revelation? 

Some men you listen to by dint of controlling your 
wandering thoughts: other men you listen to as com¬ 
manded so to do. The orator bids you heed; and some¬ 
times not to obey him would be crass, indelicate, ill- 
mannered. He and his theme attract you. 

The time when preachers may do as the old preachers 
did, take thirty minutes to introduce their discussion, 
to climb by slow ascent to the crescendo of their elo¬ 
quence, that time is set. The time rushes, the crowd 
runs. The preacher must come at his theme at once. 
He must not deal in prolix preludes. He must leap like 
128 


THE SIN OF BEING UNINTERESTING. 


a man from a moving train and touch the ground on 
the dead run. He must instantly throw a challenge to 
man’s brain. He must not suggest, “If you keep awake 
for twenty minutes you will stay awake the remainder 
of this discourse.” They must not be allowed to get 
sleepy. He must flash his saber at the outset of the 
fray. The auditors must feel there will be battle here, 
and the skilled thrust of the sword, then they will not 
care to drowse. 

Why is not the question of a sermon being inter¬ 
esting as worthy of a preacher’s thought as whether 
it is homiletically divided Homiletical divisions are 
good sections of a sermon on which people may fall 
asleep. The homiletical divisions are good enough, but 
they are quite consistent with expeditiousness of thought 
and with giving an audience a fascinating utterance 
to give heed to. Vital divisions are more imp ortant 
than homiletical divisions . Good homiletical divisions 
are such as say things that ought to be said. A ser¬ 
mon should be a fire, not simply a smoke. Nobody has 
to come to preaching. Students have to come to class 
so as to get grades. The difference is utter. The class¬ 
room method will not win a hearing. I once heard a 
schoolmaster with grim words say to an audience which 
deserved better treatment at his hands, “I do n’t want 
your cheers, I want your attention.” He missed the 
question which every preacher must face, namely, how 
to have a hearing. The preacher must first make a 
hearing, then make a sermon for a hearing he has ac¬ 
quired. To sit in the class-room and philosophize as 
to how people ought to go to church is rather witless 
9 129 




THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


waste of time. They will not go to church unless the 
preacher interests them. The pious may go to church 
from a sense of duty. The impious will not; and the 
preacher is out after both the pious and the impious. 

To be interesting is no sin: to be prosy is no sign 
of depth of thought or piety of life. The sin is in 
being uninteresting with so thrilling a gospel as it is 
each pastor’s office to present. The charm of high des¬ 
tiny is on the message, and the mercy of heavenly help. 

This article is not a plea for sensationalism. Only 
weak men are sensational. The preacher who knows 
the art of preaching will never need to be sensational. 
He will be inspirational. This is a plea for dealing 
squarely with a message which has not its like this side 
of heaven, and in all its relation has not its like inside 
of heaven. 

The preacher can not scold an audience into coming 
to hear him preach: he can coax them. But his wise 
coaxing must be in being interesting. Self-respect pre¬ 
cludes a preacher from going from house to house urg¬ 
ing people to come and hear him preach out of sym¬ 
pathy for him and his small audience. Let every 
preacher beware of this deadly microbe. His right way 
and manly way is to make people want to come and 
hear him. That is a dignified and holy use of his 
powers. ‘‘How can they hear without a preacher?” was 
the question propounded by Paul, a preacher. And 
just as well be without a preacher as to have a preacher 
the public does not want to hear. 

Not a few men who preach think they are so deep 
the public can not grasp their thought, and so take 
130 


THE SIN OF BEING UNINTERESTING. 


solace to themselves for having a diminished audience. 
This view is egotism without blemish. It is ridiculous. 
Nobody is so deep as to hurt; and no thought is so 
deep as that, if mastered by the preacher himself, it 
can not be put so an average man or woman can un¬ 
derstand it. It is muddy preaching that is mistaken 
for deep preaching. Any thought clearly grasped by 
a preacher and presented clearl^j to his auditors will 
render any such thought intelligible. People are 
brainier than the conceited preacher has comprehended. 
They have about as much brains as he has, and not in¬ 
frequently more. Let him treat their brains democrat¬ 
ically and use his own, and illumine his argument by 
light brought from all luminaries—from earth, heaven, 
history, poetry, fiction, soul experience, the by-paths and 
tears of his own wonder and knowledge of God, and his 
own wonder and knowledge of man: and words will smile 
and weep and ache and bleed and battle like a sword and 
trumpet like the tempest. He will not habitually find 
his auditors somnolent, but alive, eager, impetuous, and 
rising to the life of God. 

It is worth a try. Nobody knows much about 
preaching interestingly, but every minister can stumble 
toward it, and stumbling toward it is about the best our 
human frailty can command when dealing with “the 
glorious gospel of the blessed God.” 

It was and is Macaulay’s praise that he taught that 
history might be made as attractive as fiction. In fact, 
his “History of England” is as interesting as “Rob 
Roy” or “Kenilworth.” And in this effort, this legiti¬ 
mate and laudable effort of attempting to present an 
131 



THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


interesting gospel interestingly, fiction may lend hand 
of help to any minister. 

Fiction knows the art of being interesting. For¬ 
tunes and fames are constructed by this single gift. 
The fiction writers can glue attention to their story, 
which we know is story, and not history, and yet with 
such verisimilitude do they rehearse their fictions that 
we both deem it to be fact and run till out of breath 
to keep up with the running narrative. Many a time 
have I been fairly breathless in pursuit of some whirl 
of events told with such astonishing art as that they 
had me as their vassal. The novelist who can not in¬ 
terest his readers has no buyer of his books, and so he 
knows, and uses this art so that ofttlmes we have each 
of us said, “I could not lay this story down until it was 
finished.” There is a lesson here each preacher may 
strive to learn. Why may not preachers have the power 
of narrative and the thrill of the raconteur brought over 
into the high proclamations of which he is high priest? 
He ought, and a reading of fascinating narrative will 
materially help him to catch the secret of fascinating 
discourse. They who read “Quentin Durward” are 
reading a narrative which bears more on the preaching 
of a sermon than many guess. The story compels us. 
The sermon ought to compel us. No schoolmaster is 
cheap who can tutor the preacher to add to his hearing 
by making his discourse as fascinating as story writers’ 
books. “The Scarlet Letter” has a sermon in its core, 
a sermon of such high intent and worth that we may 
not exaggerate its depth or value, yet with what dra¬ 
matic instinct is it told! and how it rivets the soul and 
132 


THE SIN OF BEING UNINTERESTING. 


digs its fear into the heart until, harrowing as “Ham¬ 
let,” it bears us with it whithersoever the story goes! 
or, how “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. 
Hyde” rushes on like a mad chariot driven by a mad¬ 
man, but ever carrying us in its lurching and furious 
speed! Here is food for thought. 

Set it down calmly, it is a sin to be uninteresting 
in the proclaiming the gospel, and all masters of cre¬ 
ating interest are rightly our masters, at whose feet we 
sit in the name of the Christ we love, and whose por¬ 
trait we would fain fasten on everybody’s soul. The 
story must be told, and it must be fascinatingly told. 

Help us, our God, to tell it so, to the end that the 
very many may come to hear us, and so shall be brought 
to know Thee, whom to know aright is life and peace. 
Amen. 


133 


The Pastor. 


The pastor is the preacher shepherding his people. 
Some there are in the ministry who resent the member¬ 
ship’s desire for them to call at all. For one, I never 
felt fraternal to this mood. It appears to me crass, if 
the truth must be uttered. A preacher has legs for 
something, and it is good to have legs which are a 
means of grace. Many a minister can be found who 
would gladly believe his words were means of grace, 
but who would never attempt to make his legs means 
of grace. But we may settle to it that a pastor is what 
plenty of people want, and what plenty more want 
than many a pastor wots of. Hearts want hearts at 
close range. Looking at a preacher through an opera 
glass is not the kind of inspection most wholesome. 
Personally it has always occurred to me that if my 
people did not care to see me in their homes, did not 
wish me around and near them, then here was a case 
of real catastrophe. My belief is that this is the right 
view to take. If you are lovable parishioners will want 
you near: if you are not lovable they will want you 
remote. I wonder what man in the ministerial ranks 
would want an absentee pastoral relation at such a 
price ? 

The need of pastoral work is not here mooted. Its 
need is assumed. Simply some suggestions are haz¬ 
arded. 


134 


THE PASTOR. 


1. Call on all your members. 

Call on them often. Once a year is not enough. 
Dr. Watson in his beautiful book “The Cure of Souls” 
says, once a year; but whatever may be the needs of 
an English congregation, that is not sufficient for an 
American congregation. The reason is apparent. A 
pastoral call is not a piece of red tape: it is a piece 
of holy service. How can a preacher get acquainted 
with his people by calling only once a year? They 
have had an instance of a preacher’s presence, but not 
a tender touch of a friendly hand which loved to touch 
their own. My own custom was to see all my members 
four times a year, though that is more arduous than 
is necessary, but not too often for the purpose of the 
call. But a preacher should go frequently enough to 
avoid the appearance of being a sample of a pastor and 
also the appearance of doing a thing because it was 
duty and so writ in the bond. 

3. Let the call be brief. Members do not need 
sitting up with unless they are sick. They need see¬ 
ing. They want to feel that they have place in the 
pastor’s heart and in the recollection of the Church. A 
brief call will do a number of things. If it is known 
that a pastor will not stay all summer, he will find 
that the members will be much less frequently “out” 
when he calls. I have known pastors and others who 
in their calling had no terminal facilities. They would 
stay and stay and stay. They seemed to want to go, 
but had no starting facilities. They would lapse into 
silence, would conjure up things to say—but would not 
conjure up how to go. The getting away is quite as 
135 


THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


much an art as coming. The pastoral call is not for 
the purpose of sitting down on the member called on 
any more than sitting up with him. It is for the pur¬ 
pose of getting near to him, of suggesting you love 
him, without the formulary of words to the same effect. 
A brief call, taking heed of the fact that others, both 
women and men, have something to do as well as your¬ 
self, and should be let do them, will bring a pastor to 
the house in a frame of speed without haste, will bring 
him to the point of anything he wants to say, will give 
him an attentive and not bored audience of one while 
he is a-saying it, will send him away with the wish 
on lip and heart, “Can’t you stay longer?” Any num¬ 
ber of times better will that be than to have the mem¬ 
ber thinking inly, “When will he go?” and covertly 
looking at the clock, or at son or daughter who may 
be present, as to say, “I think he will go soon.” A 
brief call will accomplish all things needing accomplish¬ 
ing, and better than a long call. Of course, every pas¬ 
tor must have sense if he can conveniently, and when 
people are shut-ins and sick, and need toning up, or if 
persons have doubts which need clearing up, then tarry 
longer; but even then the knowledge the one called on 
has that you are not there to stay an afternoon will 
secure for your words an apt attention and a glowing 
heed which will go far to planting your words in the 
good ground of the soul. Brevity of calls is specially 
strategic when calling on business men. “This is my 
busy day,” was the card the editor turned toward me 
when I was on my first charge and was coming to pay 
my first call; and I saw him turn the card so as to have 


THE PASTOR. 


that legend before my eyes as I entered. He was my 
good angel. I took that hint. When I speedily rose 
to go, he not being bored to death by my call, he 
said in unperfunctory manner, “Don’t go so soon,” 
to which I gave rejoinder, “This is your busy day.” 
“No, I’m in no hurry.” “Yes,” I replied, “editors 
are always rushed, I know.” And out I came, and he 
did not know that I had seen him turn his motto adroitly 
for my eyes when my name was announced as visitor. 
But never after that first call was the motto put out 
before my eyes. He found I could adjourn without 
the motion being put. If a pastor will get the repute 
of not tarrying long, he will be delighted on seeing 
how hale will be his welcome wherever he comes. They 
will all want him to stay because they know he has sense 
enough to be gone. 

4. Do not always talk religion. That will shock 
some who always hold a meeting when they call. But 
let us consider that the main thing a pastoral call is 
for is to establish a domestic relation for the preacher 
in the hearts of his people. He wants to become one 
of their home folks, which is one of their heart folks. 
He is courting their hearts, well knowing that, in gen¬ 
eral, the amount of good he will do his members will 
be in the ratio that they love him. This gospel is a heart 
issue, put it how you will and come at it from what 
angle you will. So the minister is candidating for a 
place in their affections, and by .calling and they thus 
coming to know him and that he cares to know them, 
this end is the more readily and validly achieved. To 
get to know all who are in that house, to inquire for 
137 


THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


every one under that roof, to remember the name of 
each child, to make inquiry for members of the house¬ 
hold who are absent, and say, ‘‘Remember me to her 
when you write,” and so keep alive the sense of the 
family as well as individual love you bear that house¬ 
hold,—^that makes a pastoral call, whether you talk re¬ 
ligion or not. That every call a pastor makes should 
be of the revival order is simply a piece of grievous 
misconception. Those friends come to hear their pas¬ 
tor preach every Sunday once or twice. Why should 
he preach a sermon every time he calls? No, we are 
creatures of our training rather than masters of our 
calling when we do so. Get close to your members by 
pastoral calls and kindliness, and then they will give 
the readier heed to what things the minister says from 
the pulpit. 

5. Have sense about calling. When a house is 
topsy turvy and the rugs are out and you plainly see 
the calamity of the year is on—even house-cleaning— 
do n’t go in. The lady will invite you, but do n’t ac¬ 
cept. There is your chance to show you have some 
sense yourself. You will stand at the door a moment 
and tell her how glad you are you do n’t have to help 
her at what she is doing, leave love for her husband 
and the children, and go on about your business and 
leave her to go on about hers; and when her husband 
comes home in the evening she will sing your praises 
for being the most sensible man she ever knew. Many 
a minister has effectually barred the door against any 
possible influence in a family simply by lack of gump¬ 
tion. He saw the women folks with their “fixups” on, 
138 


THE PASTOR. 


and did n’t take the hint that they were going some^ 
where, but would sit and animadvert and sermonize; 
and the women would have their opinion. Or a pastor 
comes in and finds the young lady with a gentleman 
friend, and will stay and entertain said gentleman 
friend when both he and the lady, who thinks herself 
quite competent to entertain him, are disgusted, and 
that pastor can hardly regain standing with those young 
folks because he has been so maladroit. If he would 
say, after a moment or two of tarrying, “Really, I sup¬ 
pose you friends can entertain each other, and I wil) 
not intrude,” he would earn their lasting gratitude— 
and he would likely be called in to marry them. And, 
jest aside, he would have leadership in their lives. Many 
times preachers are so engrossed with their pastoral 
concerns that they do not get at the magnitude of the 
concerns of others. 

6. Do not always pray when you call. This will 
seem heresy and is not. It is just good sense doing 
business. It was my own custom in a Sunday or two 
after taking a pastorate to say from the pulpit that 
the pastor was never rushed with work, that he was 
never in a hurry, and when he called he would be glad 
to pray with the friends if they so desired and would 
invite him, but that he never felt free to take the 
charge of a home out of the hands of those native to 
that home, and did not furnish manners for his mem¬ 
bers. This did the deed. If any did not invite him 
to pray they could not complain because he did not. 
He had shifted the burden from his shoulders to theirs. 
Besides it made many a host and hostess mindful of 
139 


THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


their Christian manners. When those called on were 
sick it was this pastor’s custom to pray without invi¬ 
tation; or when sorrow had laid heavy hand on their 
hearts, then, sometimes standing in parting, sometimes 
kneeling, he would offer a brief prayer and tender, 
touching their hurt and need, and sometimes he has 
been thus able to breathe out a word to God with 
some man or woman who cared not for holy things. 
But the getting closer to hearts is still the main mat¬ 
ter, and these other belongings take their places nat¬ 
urally and easily, only the pastoral rounds must not 
run into the coherency of a habit which must fulfill 
itself. 

7. Do not call the children in from play to visit 
with the preacher, nor allow the mother to call them in. 
No lack of wisdom can be greater than to have chil¬ 
dren think the preacher’s coming is a signal for the 
fun to stop. When the child just let out from the day 
of school and having a happy taste of freedom is called 
from play with the dulcet words from the mother, 

“Come in, dear, Brother- wants to see you!” 

then is one little heart barred with bigger or smaller 
bars, as the case may be, against the minister; but if, 
. when the mother wishes to call the children from their 
play, the pastor demurs, and leaves his love for them, 
and says he would have been glad to have had a visit 
with them, the next time he comes they will probably 
come, and nothing can deter them. He is out for souls, 
and must have a seasonable as well as a reasonable craft. 
Pastoral calling done carelessly or perfunctorily or 
with scant tact had better not be done at all. But 


140 



THE PASTOR. 


not being done at all, one of the wide doors for preacher 
effectiveness has been peremptorily closed. 

To bring from house to house the love of the Church 
and the knowledge of the Church and the atmosphere 
of the Church will do good and will open many hearts 
so that, now in particular, when evangelism must be per¬ 
sonal so largely and the still hunt for souls must be en¬ 
gaged in if we would win souls widely, the pastoral 
office was never in so great demand. Those who would 
love their Master’s calling must espouse their Master’s 
method, which was to go where the people were, and 
not solemnly set up a preaching place and let the audi¬ 
tors come His way or stay away. Jesus in His preach¬ 
ing journeys, in His goings about doing good, was 
nothing other than a pastor bringing Himself and His 
gospel with Him wherever there were hearts needing it. 

We must go about doing good, must go with our 
Christ and His gospel, and show by our coming that 
the heart of the Church is still the heart of the Christ, 
which considers not its own weariness nor toil, but con¬ 
siders only how by all means it may save some. 


141 


The Pastor and the Siek. 

1. Pay much heed to the sick. 

2. Call immediately as soon as notified that sickness 
exists in the family. 

3. Call often. 

4. Do not stay long, 

5. Do not, as a rule, talk about their sickness. 

6. Do not always talk about religion. 

7. Do not always pray. 

8. Take with you an atmosphere of health. 

9. Bring good and sunny weather. 

10. Sometimes read a little portion of God’s Word, 
but not a hackneyed portion. 

11. Adroitly draw conversation to holy things, but 
not with funereal air. 

12. Never let the sick person think it is a burden 
for you to call. 

13. When you pray, pray briefly and tenderly. 

14. Always study to drop a helpful word, the Christ 
word, and never be mechanical about it. 

Not many things are harder than calling on the 
sick, and that so far from being reason why the pas¬ 
tor should not do it, is the best conceivable reason why 
he should. 

The rules named will in a manner cover the gener¬ 
ality of cases. 


142 


THE PASTOR AND THE SICK. 


Get the impression prevalent in your congregation 
as speedily as may be after you become its pastor that 
you covet knowledge of all cases of sickness. Do not 
do this with a resigned air as of a martyr, but with 
an air as of a man who loves his people and whose priv¬ 
ilege is in comforting them. This will have a salutary 
effect. When anybody connected with the Church is 
sick it will come to pass that they will likely ’phone 
you or send you word. “He said he wanted to know,” 
will be the phrase which will be on their lips often, when 
once it is perceived that you are genuinely a lover of 
the people, sick or well. 

Being sick is not trivial, and should never be treated 
so. To slur people’s disease as a small matter is never 
adroit. An adroiter way is to make your call on the 
sick such as to dispel their thought of sickness while 
you are there and when you shall be gone. But to say, 
“O, you are n’t sick much,” or, “I would n’t mind that,” 
is always maladroit and detaches from you the person 
so accosted. Fine feeling will dictate a more gracious 
method of approach. If the preacher bring not heal¬ 
ing with his coming, his coming is in vain. 

And by healing, of course, is not meant any clap¬ 
trap sort, and certainly not that common pantheistic 
heathenism calling itself Christian Science. A preacher 
brings a larger life and the wider ideas, and projects 
the sense of spiritual things, which will in the end of 
the case be a surcease for sorrow and a helper in dis¬ 
ease. A good topic for the sickroom where there ia 
rheumatism, wild, racking, sleepless, when joints are 
swollen and blue with the continuance of the pain, is 
143 


THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


not rheumatism. That is the last thing. To discuss 
rheumatism to rheumatics is scarcely to be forgiven. To 
give a catalogue of the rheumatic people you have 
known is not a blithe task, but is even a bloodless task, 
cruel as the thrust of a knife into a healing wound. 
Those who take such themes for discourse would better 
stay away from a sickroom. Their coming is not help¬ 
ful, but baneful. A distinguished Bishop of the Meth¬ 
odist Episcopal Church, South, when crossing the At¬ 
lantic and having listened to a dull speaker at the meet¬ 
ing for seamen’s orphans give a dreary address on the 
perils of the sea and the multitudes of shipwrecks, be¬ 
ing detached to frame resolutions of thanks, sat dis¬ 
cussing with himself what adjective he might employ 
and get himself off without lying, and this is how he 
did it: “I move a vote of thanks to the gentleman 
for his tactful address.” That irony would well fit the 
pastor who would discuss rheumatism to a rheumatic 
audience of one. 

But it is wise to let the invalid talk of his own 
disease. This eases the sick man’s mind, gives him a 
feeling that you are sympathetic, and so prepares the 
sick person to listen to the preacher when he talks. 
Then let the preacher seize his talking occasion to di¬ 
vert the attention of the invalid from his own case to 
healthier strains of thought. 

Pay heed to the sick. Be exact in this courtesy. 
This is your time to reach some who at other times 
might be far beyond your reach or the reach of any. 
On your Church bulletin, if your Church publishes one, 
have a standing invitation to the congregation to in- 
144 


THE PASTOR AND THE SICK. 


fonn you of any case of sickness. People need you 
then, whether they want you or not. When a man lies 
sick he has a little leisure for thought—for thought 
about himself, for thought about God. Many are God¬ 
less being thoughtless. The rush of life roars with its 
torrent in their ears so that the gentler voices of the 
soul are crushed into silence. But on the sick-day eter¬ 
nity may have a word with the crowded soul. The 
deathless voices may begin to call for a hearing. 
Things done, many things undone, may be productive 
of sorrow. Here is a chance for a soul, nay, maybe 
the chance of a lifetime. If not used then, is it lost 
probably, and even probably altogether. 

Call immediately. Somehow in my earliest ministry 
I had my attention called to the prime necessity of im¬ 
mediate attendance on the sick, so that I recall with 
deep gratitude to God that through the years of my 
ministry I was never so dilatory in such calling that 
any sick body has gone beyond the need of the ministry 
of me before I called. Call the same day you are 
asked for. “Will you call.^” said a woman to me at 
the chancel after the Sunday morning service. “Truly,” 
was the reply. “What time to-morrow.^” was the ques¬ 
tion. “Immediately, to-day,” was the reply. The next 
day the sick body died. Remorse deep and pungent 
will dig into the heart knowing that any one wanted 
to see you and did not get to see you—sick, dying, 
waiting for you, and you not coming! Besides, some 
of the bitterest hostilities I have ever seen generated 
toward a pastor had such genesis. A daughter or a 
son, an old father or an old mother, a Christian and 
10 145 


THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


Church member for a half century of years, and a 
pastor importuned repeatedly to call, the son saying, 
“Mother wants to see you so much— won't you come?” 
And in this excuse and that the call delayed till the 
son’s mother was dead and in the great company of the 
redeemed. Who could blame a son or daughter if they 
could not heal the heart-hurt of such unforgivable neg¬ 
lect? Sermons are not so important in preparation as 
the ministry to the sick. “I was sick, and ye visited 
Me,” was one of the words Jesus let fall which should 
call our ministry to a self-reckoning. 

If a preacher has had much sickness in his own 
family, that will help him to be thoughtful for the sick. 
He will then be very tender and will know how a knock 
at the door with the question, “How is the lassie to¬ 
day?” helps make a whole dark day bright. But any¬ 
way, how long the days are to the sick, and how un¬ 
eventful; and how calming to the invalid, and how rest¬ 
ful, to know himself or herself not forgotten! Who¬ 
ever is neglectful of the sick, the minister must not be. 
Call quickly. 

The pastor bears a vivid sense of a congregation’s 
debt to its members in this attendance of himself in time 
of sickness. It helps the congregation to do the fra¬ 
ternal thing. It is worth while to say in Sunday morn¬ 
ing service such and such of the Church members are 
sick and “a call would not be inopportune.” Some an¬ 
nouncement is very appropriate in the prayer-meeting. 
In the quiet loveliness of that devotional service week 
by week the roster of the Church’s sick should be called 
and a tender word of admonition offered, such as: “If 
146 


THE PASTOR AND THE SICK. 


it were your beloved that was sick, would you not 
come a neighbor coming?” or if some member is very 
sick, drop this word of counsel, “He can not be seen, 
being very ill, but if you will just call at the house, 
not go in, but leave your love, it will be Christlike thing 
and bring a smile to weary lips and gladness to discour¬ 
aged hearts.” A part of the preacher’s business is to 
inculcate the ethics of kindness and thoughtful love. 

Call often. Do not be a bore, but in those instances 
where death is at the door for many a day, a single 
call savors too much of the perfunctory. It begets glad¬ 
ness, but not gladness enough, so that sometimes a body 
ought to call daily for months. I recall a woman in 
my own Church, where this was done much to my own 
help; for she was full of such calm confidence down to 
the murk where the shadows deepened, and it was good 
when her breath grew short and words weakened to 
whispers to know that I had brought good comfort on 
many a day. A pastor loses nothing by calling often 
on the very sick, and even in the important matter of 
sermon-making he is apt to find there illustrations 
and suggestions which have all the intense application 
of an arrow dipped in blood. What you heard from 
a dying body’s lips will in all probability profoundly 
impress your auditors when the body who was dying was 
well known to them and much loved by many of them. 

It is probably not necessary to dwell further upon 
this beautiful opportunity and obligation which be¬ 
longs to every pastor, save to say that in no depart¬ 
ment of ministerial work do intellectual agility, calm 
and solacing observation have more play than in pas- 

147 


THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


toral visitation. Here he must not fail to be at his 
best and wisest. In praying with the sick he must be 
as “wise as a serpent and as harmless as a dove.” 
Prayers for the sick must be very brief, must wing the 
thoughts of the sufferer rather than drag them up to 
God, and the conversation on religious themes must be 
so adroitly mianaged as to leave the sick body in an 
atmosphere of the comfort of God. 

Preachers who shall with loving delight in a man¬ 
ner master the art of pastoral visitation will find some 
of the sweetest comfort of their souls to be in the oc¬ 
cupation of their office for God in so alluring the life 
that is weary with pain and care to lean upon the rod 
and staff that comfort no less on the high plains of 
life than in the valley of the shadow of death. 


148 


The Pastor and the Child. 


If any man does not love little children, that man 
must not preach. Jesus loved little children and was 
never so busy that He could not take time with them. 
Little children never bothered Jesus. The original Lover 
of the baby is Godf Of all beautiful thoughts of God, 
is there any so beautiful as a baby.^ Humanity might 
have been produced some other way; but God did give 
humanity a mother, and God did provide a mother a 
babe. And he who has seen any mother with any baby 
knows that joy reaches no such parallax as the joy of 
the mother with her baby on her heart. Every right 
body talks baby talk to the baby. The little child does 
lead them, this “them” being all the adulthood of the 
world. Little folks have their way with us, and a 
sweet way it is—God’s way. 

To think that before any baby comes to its birth¬ 
day, love is waiting for him; and that when he comes 
to birthday, love is waiting to greet him with a hundred 
thousand kisses: that always appeals to me as being the 
authentic miracle of this world of miracle,—as authen¬ 
tic as the miracle Spring, and more beautiful. The blue¬ 
bird’s song and the dog-tooth violet’s bloom are not so 
full of miracle as the baby’s coo, aye, as a baby’s cry. 

Any such as loves not this advent of humanity in 
babyhood and feels not the thrill of a cradle and does 
149 


THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


not feel his heart tugged at by the sight or thought 
of any baby, barbarian, Scythian, bond or free, black 
or white, straight-eyed or slant-eyed, such a man must 
not fumble at the holy office of a pastor. 

I have ever had a touch of heartache to have seen 
Jesus with His arms full and His breast full of little 
folks. The mothers knew; they followed their hearts; 
they felt that this strong face and those kind lips would 
love to kiss their babies, nor did they mistake. As they 
thought of Him He was. The men, sea-bronzed, huge¬ 
voiced, rudely pressed them backward, saying, ‘‘He is 
busy with grown folks and bigger folks—do n’t bother 
Him,” but found the mothers mother-wise and a trifle 
obdurate—a steady trifle—and Jesus, hearing the men’s 
voices above the noises of the throng and the mothers’ 
voices with their falsetto key, sounded with the clear 
voice which quieted the mothers’ feverish voices and 
the disciples’ peevish and arbitrary voices, “Suffer little 
children to come unto Me, and forbid them not, for of 
such is the kingdom of God;” and the women, with a 
woman’s last word, filled with woman’s laughter, said, 
“I told you so,”—and Jesus held their babies, and His 
eyes and His lips were sweet. I have heartache to have 
been eye-witness of that beautiful poetry. Mayhap I 
shall see it yet some bright summer day in heaven. 

“He carrieth the lambs in His bosom,” was written 
of the Shepherd; and the same must be written of all 
under shepherds. And the “Lovest thou Me.?” which 
the Christ at the gray morning by the gray sea leveled 
at Peter’s shaggy heart was staccatoed by “Feed My 
lambs.” The Good Shepherd can not forget His lambs; 
150 



THE PASTOR AND THE CHILD. 


He knows their wee cry in the dark, He knows they 
have no language but a cry, and knows to interpret it 
aright. He knows. He knows! He knows the smile of 
the little faces; He knows the swift impetuosities which 
in the child prelude the vast impetuosities and tremen¬ 
dous audacities of faith and toil and love and building 
of the world which shall come in childhood’s brave to¬ 
morrow. These hid mysteriousnesses called children are 
inobscure to Christ the Shepherd of the heavenly flock. 
And the Savior’s love for little children is a communi¬ 
cable passion to every minister of God. Pray that this 
passion may be communicated to you. 

That a preacher be childless is a real disqualification 
for the surest pastoral effectiveness. Fortunately this 
is not a disqualification with which many preachers are 
handicapped. The minister usually, whatever his gen¬ 
eral poverty, is not poor in children. Babies like to 
come to preachers’ houses, and a body can not blame 
them, for to now no sweeter place has been discovered 
to be bom and to be brought up than in a preacher’s 
house. Such habitations are, as a rule, poor in money 
but rich in culture; quiet houses with generous impulse 
and intelligent manhood, and love for others which 
make any heart or home harboring it a beatitude; rich 
in the Word of God read and loved, in grace before 
meat, in the gratitude after meat, in the prayer offered 
with wife and child together in the family flock, of 
which God the Shepherd is the conceded Head, and such 
kind thought of others and for others, in love that counts 
service of others not a bondage nor a chore, but a favor 
from heaven. What a gentle fold in which to be a 
151 


THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


lamb; and here babies are welcome. Nobody like a 
Christian can attach value to children. A child is bom 
to our house to-day, is what Christian parents sing. 
The song before Bethlehem when the Christ came, long 
ago, has sifted down its invincible music about the 
cradle of every child bom of Christian parentage. In 
the preacher’s house, what touches Christ is the conceded 
governance. 

This celestial state of childhood (as I will term it) 
is ever present in the heart. To rear an immortal, 
what think you of that holy office ? Babies usually make 
din around a preacher’s house: and this is well. Blessed 
are all houses which have children in them; and a pathos 
neighboring tears makes us sad in the household which 
is childless. Any house which has no babe of its own 
should go searching for one of God’s little waifs and 
make for it a home. No cultured woman has a right 
to keep house without a child to plan for and pray for 
and mother for the Lord. The childless should haunt 
orphanages, where the little motherless lambs are herded 
rather than homed. You can not frequent any nursery 
at orphanages and hospitals, where little babes are 
folded in the cribs, without wanting to carry one away 
on your heart. Blessed luggage! 

And what is thus tme of any baby is in special tmer 
of a preacher’s baby. It is scarcely given to hearts to 
know the mercy and the meaning and the prophecy of 
childhood without the possession of a child for a body’s 
own. Children must be lived with to be loved as they 
ought and to be feared for as they ought and to be 
prayed for as they ought; and if to any the term “to- 
152 


THE PASTOR AND THE CHILD. 


be-feared-for” appears to be not quite the apt word, let 
him know that it is an apt word, as will be found by 
being a father and mother of a child. Babeless people 
are likely to be nervous with other people’s children, 
and are specially apt to become superwise as to the 
rearing of children. One child in the preacher’s house 
will take the tuck out of any theories of child culture 
and leave the preacher less omniscient, but more endur¬ 
able. A man’s son died when he was just climbing to 
the crest of the hill of manhood, and a brother minister 
wrote him: “My heart is with you. I have a son.” And 
that kindredship of thought, expressed in such terse 
phrasing, was worth all voluble compassions of the 
childless. 

A preacher known to me, whose multitudinous duties 
in a wide metropolis compelled his being gone till late 
almost all nights, on his coming home very late found 
on the ajar door of his little girl’s room, where the light 
was burning low, a card, on which was written by a 
sleepy hand in large and wandering characters, “Come 
in here, dear daddy—good night.” He, coming home 
after midnight, knew that the sleeping little girl was 
waiting in her slumber for her kiss; and he minded and 
“came in here,” and then there was another good-night. 
Among that preacher-man’s treasures (and he has many 
from many lands—incunabula and rare coins and rare 
books and rare bindings, and items of scholarship of 
the centuries, and brave books which felt the pressure 
of the hand-press of the earliest years of printing) I 
have seen this sleepy scrawl,, and if I mind rightly there 
are tears upon the card, and the tears were his. Could 
153 


THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


any man, however nature-wise in the lore of human 
hearts, know how a father feels toward his daughter 
as this man knows? And any child could answer, “No.” 

So must every preacher be not a childish preacher, 
but a child’s preacher. He must be magnified by 
children, and he must magnify children. If a pastor 
thinks of children slightingly he will treat them slight¬ 
ingly: he will call them “sis” and “bub;” he will over¬ 
look them; and a child must never be overlooked. God 
does not; God’s ministers must not. “For unto us a 
Child is born; and the government shall be on His 
shoulders, and He shall be called Wonderful”—^this is 
the epiphany of childhood. 

I was present once at a Sacramental Supper, where 
at the Lord’s table knelt all such as were children of 
God. Beside a certain father knelt his little girl; and 
the ministering man passed the elements to the father, 
but passed the elements by the child;—and there the 
little girl knelt and wept at the Lord’s table with a 
broken heart, sobbing to the father when they had risen 
from the Lord’s table, where she had not been a guest, 
“Papa, do I not belong to Christ?” And my heart, 
which saw this scene, was broken like the heart of the 
little child. If the Savior of little children had been 
there that day He would have rebuked that minister 
with the stem voice like the voice to His rebuked dis¬ 
ciples long ago, because he should have learned with 
twenty centuries of the Christ and the Christ value on 
the child the importance of the little child. There could 
be no excuse for such inhospitality at the table of the 
Lord. That preacher was indefensible. 

154 


THE PASTOR AND THE CHH^D. 


But this was not a sporadic instance of forgetful¬ 
ness, though no minister has any right ever to forget a 
child. It was endemic with him: he did not feel the 
value of the child. He could pat a child on the head 
and patronize the child, but could not value the child. 
A little child is a very human affair. We misconstrue 
him when we think slightingly of his troubles and his 
joys. A child’s troubles are very real and very bitter. 
While they last they are severer than the troubles of 
manhood and womanhood, because the child has no to¬ 
morrow in the landscape of his griefs. I have never 
been witness to deeper sorrow than that of a growing 
boy at school, when, having failed in his examination, 
he sobbed on his father’s shoulder, “O, papa, the dis¬ 
grace of it, the disgrace of it!” Poor laddie! And his 
father tucked his cheek against his heart, held him fast, 
and comforted him as this father oftentimes had been 
held fast by the arms of God and comforted of Him. 

“Only a child’s troubles!” Pastor, never be guilty 
of uttering that sinful word. “Only a child”—never 
be guilty of that tedious, lying phrase. It is a child, 
God’s child, died for by Christ, ransomed by the Lord, 
therefore a child—humanity’s child, God’s child. And 
one of the mighty makers of the world that is to be. 

Thus must the pastor acknowledge the child. This 
right estimate will naturally and quickly dominate all 
his relationships toward them. He will always treat 
them worthily if he never esteems them unworthily. 
How pathetically often does the eye light on this para¬ 
graph in a religious paper: “A gracious ingathering, 
hundred accessions, mostly adults.” How very 
155 


one 


THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


wicked that is, and how very frivolous! Such ministers 
lightly esteem the child. How seldom, if ever, do you 
light on such a paragraph as this: “A gracious out¬ 
pouring, one hundred accessions, mostly little children.” 
Why not ? Preachers do not write in that tone of voice; 
if they were wiser they would. One hundred accessions, 
mostly little children, constitute a much more valuable 
addition to the Church than an equal number “mostly 
adults,” because the adults have to be managed so much, 
and their lives are malformed and full of vagaries, and 
they will need to spend so much time in unlearning, and 
then they learn so tardily, whereas children can be 
brought up “in the nurture and admonition of the 
Lord.” 

As a pastor, I definitely believe that the most fruit¬ 
ful work a preacher can do is to give heed to the chil¬ 
dren, to bring them into the Church, to tutor them, in 
the Church, to put their childish feet on the highway 
to the heavenly mountains, and in heaven they will rise 
up and call him blessed. 

The wastes of sin are very tragical. Tares can 
be sown in the night; they can not be rooted up in the 
night, nor yet in a day. The economic effort for the 
redemption of this world is the effort to keep the chil¬ 
dren with the Christ. 

As a pastor must have the right estimate of the 
child as a community and heavenly commodity and per¬ 
sonality, so must he have a right idea of it as a subject 
of redemption. Only two theories are possible touch¬ 
ing a child at his birth: 

Theory one: The child belongs to the devil. 

156 


THE PASTOR AND THE CHILD. 


Theory two: The child belongs to God. 

The Church or the person who would rise and make a 
disquisition to prove that the child belonged to the devil 
would have a hazardous enterprise. The common sense 
of mankind knows better. When the common sense of 
mankind and the view of Jesus are at one, we may al¬ 
low that the coincident voices of Christ and humanity 
are always wise. 

Suppose we consider the first view, namely, that 
the child is the devil’s child. No man could get a hear¬ 
ing for a moment in championing such a theory. 

The other theory is that every child belongs to 
God, was bom God’s child, before he can belong to 
that wicked one and arrive at such unworthy notoriety. 
Such Churches as refuse to let little children join them 
and refuse the sign of baptism, which is a sign of be¬ 
ing a Christian and belonging to the Church, must do 
so, if they act logically, on the first theory—that chil¬ 
dren belong to the devil. But across the path of such 
thmsts out the jutting crag, “For of such is the king¬ 
dom of God.” In the light of Jesus’ authoritative and 
conclusive saying we must frame our theories of a child 
as related to God; and the child as related to God is 
the measure of the child’s relation to the Christian 
Church. 

“Jesus Christ, by the grace of God, tasted death 
for every man,” is the statement of universal redemp¬ 
tion. In that sunlight we may walk swiftly and safely. 
There is no unsaved person bom into this world! Alle- 
lujah! How can any man or woman repress the halle¬ 
lujah when such a tmth is grasped? There are no 
157 


THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


heathen children born into this world. All the babes 
born into this world are Christian. Hallelujah! I love 
that thought. It is worthy of God. It is in keeping 
with the Christ. This world is bom Christian. Every 
soul born amongst men is a saved soul. I consider that 
the greatest thought which has ever crossed the path 
of my thinking. It is sublime, heartening, illuminating. 
Children are bora in heathen lands, but are not heathen: 
they are Christians. There are only heathen men and 
women. There are sinners in this world, very many of 
them; but there are no persons born sinners. Hear the 
Christ: “For of such is the Kingdom of God.” This is 
said of all babies. 

There is every sort of difference between being born 
“sinful” and being born “sinner.” Everybody is bora 
“sinful,” “as the sparks to fly upward,” but to sinful¬ 
ness there attaches no guilt. We are not responsible 
for a bent. To sinnemess there attaches guilt. “Sin¬ 
fulness” and “sinnemess” are radically diflPerent terms. 
We are bora sinful: we make ourselves sinners. To 
doubt that the babe dying is safely housed in heaven 
would be strange atheism. “The streets of the city are 
full of boys and girls,” is the laughter-laden description 
of the City of God given long since by a prophet who 
saw things as they were. You can not listen for the 
heavenly song and not hear the children singing. Chil¬ 
dren are bom in the kingdom of the Christ. This the 
preacher must not fail to know, and this the preacher 
must never forget. Therefore his able-bodied task is to 
keep children with the Christ. This also is the task of 
parenthood. And if children belong to the kingdom of 
158 


THE PASTOR AND THE CHILD. 


God they belong to the Church of God and have the 
rights and privileges of the Church. “Forbid them not, 
for of such is the kingdom of God.” 

And amongst the privileges of the Church of God 
stand chiefly the Sacrament of Baptism and the Sacra¬ 
ment of the Lord’s Supper. Baptism is the sign that 
we are children of God and that we are members 
of the Church of God. The Lord’s Supper is the 
sign that we continue to belong to the Church of 
God. Baptism answers once for all: the Sacrament 
of the Lord’s Supper occurs often in “remembrance 
of Me,” as says the Christ in words that we never 
shall forget. The Roman Catholic baptizes children 
to save them from hell. The Anglican communion 
baptizes children for baptismal regeneration. The 
Methodist baptizes children for neither of these reasons. 
Methodists baptize babes because they belong to the 
kingdom of God, and in answer to the convincing say¬ 
ing of Jesus, Lord of redemption, “of such is the king¬ 
dom of God.” 

And all baptized children in the Methodist Epis¬ 
copal Church are members of the Church on probation 
and are by the polity of the Church organized into 
classes and have class leaders. I do not know many 
things which seem to me to be in such beautiful har¬ 
mony with the thought of God as this. 

And as members of the Church and receiving the 
sign of Church members, namely, baptism, children have 
a right to the advantages of the Church, and so they 
kneel ^t the Lord’s table and partake of the broken 
body and spilled blood, sign of the love of Christ, which 
159 


THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


passeth knowledge and sign, too, that the children so 
partaking of these holy emblems of the Christ love Him 
who is everlasting Lover of the children. 

This, then, being the attitude of Christ and the 
attitude of the Church, the pastor who does not come 
close and keep close to children is woefully behind the 
times, namely, the times of the Church and the times 
of the Christ, and shows himself agnostic to the work¬ 
ing plans of God. “He that winneth souls is wise;” 
but the wisest winning of souls is that which keeps souls 
with the Christ, keeps them in the Church, and saves 
them from leaving their father’s house; keeps them 
from the dreary journey of the prodigal son, as also 
the dreary fate of the elder brother, and keeps them at 
home with God and in service of humankind; keeps 
them with every faculty intact to serve their generation 
—the most productive form of effort known to the 
Church of Jesus Christ. 

The pastor should know the children—should know 
them by their names, should inquire for them when he 
calls, should ask them to come to church, should invite 
them to come to the chancel on Sunday and shake hands 
with him. In a church once served by this writer a 
little lad, Paul by name, only old enough to walk right 
sturdily, came up to the chancel every Sunday morning, 
never failing; however thick the press there, he never was 
dismayed, but somewhere among the legs of the big 
folks there was little Paul, knowing his preacher looked 
for him; and whether his mother and father came with 
him or not, there was he, a little member in God’s 
Church and quite properly at home with God’s Church 
160 



THE PASTOR AND THE CHILD. 


and God’s minister. If there are more beautiful sights 
than this little lad urging unambiguous way to “his 
preacher,” I do not now recall what those sights 
might be. 

“Suffer little children to come unto Me, and forbid 
them not, for of such is the kingdom of God,” I hear 
the voice of Christ saying, and then I hear Him say¬ 
ing very softly, with a smile upon His lips, “Feed My 
lambs.” 

O God in heaven, it is written of Thee in Thy Book 
that Thou settest the solitary in families. We bless 
Thee for that gracious setting up in housekeeping and 
for all the blessed and pleasing memories which haunt 
our hearts; home memories dear as kisses on our child 
lips in the gathering dark, when mother tucked us in 
our little beds. For motherhood and fatherhood and 
babehood and childhood and all the shelter and the 
peace which are dwellers under the happy roof we 
have learned to call home we humbly bless Thee, O Giver 
of every good and perfect gift! How good Thou art, 
and how dependent we all are on the bounty of Thy 
wide, wise thoughtfulness for us! 

Bless us men who are to minister to home and all 
its sacred belongings. Help us to know the mind of 
the Lord regarding these precious relations, which are 
dear past all words and sacred as a prayer. Help us 
that in nothing we trespass against the least of these 
Thy little folk, lest our unwisdom shall cause a soul for 
which Jesus died to suffer loss and, terrible thought, 
to finally be lost. Keep us from that terror we pray 
Thee, blessed Lord, and keep us from it always. Amen. 

11 161 


The Pastor and Youth. 

Whether at any point of ministerial application 
of effort there is less comprehension of the interests 
involved, may well be doubted. If many pastors do 
understand the validity of the claims of youth upon 
their thought and love and sympathy, many do not; 
and if the preacher does, the body of the members of 
the Church do not. We shall hear much talk of the 
young man and his problems. (Would that weary word 
“problems” were buried fathoms deep in the grave. It 
has grown “stale, flat, unprofitable,” as the landscape 
of life was to Hamlet. We need a revolt against the 
phrase which has grown to be a way of saying some¬ 
thing when we have nothing to say.) But youth is 
a wiser word than the young man, and a wider word, 
too. The Church has an apostolate not less to young 
womanhood than to young manhood. The Church is 
not feminine gender, neither is it masculine gender. 
It is epicene, as the grammarians would say. We do 
misapprehend the issue involved in world redemption 
when we talk persistently about the young man or 
about the boy as we would if we talked all the while 
about the young woman or the girl. Christianity is 
not so ill-advised as this, though not a few of its vo¬ 
taries are. To hear the average temperance orator, 
woman or man, pronounce, you would think that the 
162 


THE PASTOR AND YOUTH. 


temperance cause was a man’s cause only. “We must 
save the boys,” is the inconclusive proclamation; whereas 
the temperance question is as snaring to women as to 
men. Drunkenness and the lewdness, which is its twin, 
are assassins of women and men alike, girls and boys 
alike. Society in many quarters is given to drink with 
the women folk as certainly and disastrously as with 
the men. Drunkenness is no respecter of sex. It knows 
no chivalry. Liquor will make a woman reel and babble 
in lewd songs and sayings as certainly as it will a man. 
Liquor will coarsen a woman as certainly as it will a man. 
The propaganda of temperance is as decidedly a femi¬ 
nine question as it is a masculine question, and that 
not because the men are to marry the women, and on the 
helpless women is to be thrown the ignominy and the 
penury which dog-like tramp at the heels of intem¬ 
perance, but because the women are learning to drink 
socially, and their nervous organization being more 
finely poised than a man’s, they are thus more easily 
jangled and so deranged toward better things. Tem¬ 
perance has the interests of a race at heart and in its 
plans; and the Church has the race at heart; and the 
race is man and woman, forever man and woman. 

The youth of the Church is a wide phrase. Young 
men and young women planned for for humanity and 
God is the intent of the phrase. 

Science has in recent years discovered with much 
sounding of cymbals that the period of youth is the 
period of danger, and the period of help made more 
readily possible. It is good they have found this out; 
and it is a valuable pedagogical information; but any 
163 



THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


preacher could have told them that ages ago. That 
is an old thing under the Christian sun. The scien¬ 
tists are belated on matters not a few. Some of our 
ministers are raging over the revelations of science 
touching this matter of the eligibility of youth to the 
redemptive impulsj^y^and influences; whereas, if they 
would think a little about their own prerogatives and 
the doctrines of Christianity they would rave less and 
speak forth the words of truth and soberness more. The 
Christian Church has known this all along. The im¬ 
portance of the child was discovered and revealed by 
Jesus; and the housing of youth and the holding of 
youth for the Christ and for the Church is an adage 
of the Church and has been long. “Train up a child 
in the way he should go,” was the high road then and 
is the high road now, to sobriety of life and unswerv¬ 
ing usefulness of behavior. The Bible carefully and 
prayerfully studied will be of surer value in the deli¬ 
cate questions of youth, and how to wield it for the 
bettering of itself and society and the Christian com¬ 
munity than much wandering after every psychological 
ipse dixit. Not that those are to be despised, but that 
the Church has larger light on the real capabilities 
and disabilities of this case than anybody else has. 
We have much unused light in our own house and 
should stay there a little more and wander out for 
other lights a little less. Youth for God and we for 
youth is the proposition which we do well as relig¬ 
ionists to give perpetual heed to. 

So many Church members are unjust to youth. 
Their attitude, if it were to be characterized as hostile. 
164 




THE PASTOR AND YOUTH. 


would not be far amiss. They have no patience with 
the young. They seem never to have been young them¬ 
selves, or else to have forgotten how it felt. Youth is 
a time of dreams, and in consequence a time of dan¬ 
ger. Dreams make for danger as they make for safety. 
The youth, girl or boy, is feeling for the wings each 
soul is to wear. Where will those wings bear this youth, 
is the subtle fear that leaps to speech in thoughtful 
minds and should shape itself to deeds. 

A pastor should study to bring his members into 
close touch with the young people. The young peo¬ 
ple, whether the feeling be justifiable by the fact 
or not, is not now material, seeing the feeling exists, 
feel that the older people are not sympathetic with 
them, that they are tolerated rather than regarded. 
Let each pastor know that this is how the young folks 
do feel whether they ever so phrase their feelings or 
not. Many times the accusation is unjust; many times 
it is just; but in any case there is a great gulf fixed, 
and this gulf must be moved bodily. It has no business 
to exist. Let the wise pastor interest his brainiest and 
most cultured members in glad fellowship with the 
young. Let him put the newly married folk on their 
guard against the selfishness of love, which so easily 
omits all former friendships and is satisfied with the 
home and the wonder of married love and devotion. 
Such happy hearts must not forget their associates. 
They must bring their own joy to brighten the joy 
of others, who by and by may enter into their joy. 
Married folks must be brought to mingle gladly and 
continually with the unmarried folks, lest there should 
165 


THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


be a division in the interests of the Church and so a 
shortening of the service which might be rendered God 
and mankind. 

And the membership must have the continuous stim¬ 
ulative pastoral suggestion that they mix with the 
young; that they be not lookers-on, but participants; 
that youth is a hard time of life; for it is trying the 
most difficult of difficulties, namely, to find itself and 
its center of gravity and its vocation. The thoughts 
of youth are long, long thoughts, says the chaste Long¬ 
fellow; and youth does not know it, but we know it 
and must help that in the long thoughts they think 
those who love them be close beside to give a word of 
fathering of the long thought, and of gladdening when 
youth is glad, and of steering youth off from possible 
perils, of which there are such multitudes, more than 
any man may number. Youth needs sympathy. It will 
not ask it. It, as likely as not, does not know it needs 
it or wants it; but it does. Laughter needs another 
laughing voice as sincerely as weeping needs another 
voice of tears. The heartaches of youth are so genuine 
and, 0, so bitter! that to contemplate the grief which 
lurks about the heart of laughing youthhood, as we 
count youth to be, makes a body’s heart ache. If you 
could induce each woman and each man to recur to the 
bitterness as well as the brightness of his youth, it 
would ameliorate the condition of many a youth now 
on the road once traveled by our feet, which often left 
blood-prints on the road. I recall my own heartaches, 
which had no visible to-morrow, for youth stays in the 
day more than maturity does. Manhood knows the com- 
166 


THE PASTOR AND YOUTH. 


ing time is fair-minded and a rectifier of the now, if it 
needs rectifying; youth does not know this, because 
youth is not a philosopher. We get to be philosophers 
when youth is spent. Better youth than philosophy; 
but better youth with the warm hand and the helpful 
laid down hot, but not heavy, on its hand when in deep 
trouble and groping like a man in the fogs feeling for 
a dangerous way. True, youth can rid itself easier and 
sooner of its disability than maturity can do. Its re¬ 
siliency is greater; but while it stays, the pain of youth 
is even more pungent than of age. Hearts close and 
tender, how they will help! “Snug up to youth,” that 
is the advice of the wise pastor to his folks, and is 
the wise advice to a pastor for himself. Stay near 
where danger lurks, where menaces are thick, where the 
struggle of the world, the flesh, and the devil, which is 
very real and tragically real, is pressing like a pursuing 
troop. 

Youth for God. That is this world’s safety. Every¬ 
body not an atheist knows that. To start with God and 
stay with God, what a shelter from temptation! what a 
safe conduct on the long, grim way of life I How many 
of ourselves have been shielded from snares innumerable 
by belonging to the God of the Church and the Church 
of God. That is what we may well make fuel of for 
our thought. The danger of this world is the danger 
of falling into sin. The Church has every aid against 
sin and no provocative to sin. When by stratagem or 
love or by whatever manly means youth is brought un¬ 
der the influence of the Christian Church, it is a glad 
day, whether it know it or not. “Guarded” is the word 

167 


THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


Christianity can speak out loud to youth. And it must 
speak it; but it can not speak it except it secure and 
retain the confidence of youth. One might say truth¬ 
fully, so far as my own observation recalls, that youth 
is wary. It does not fall into the arms of such as 
would fain do it service. They look askance at preach¬ 
ers and think them of another gender from themselves. 
This is why siege is necessary. If the preacher is for¬ 
ever fulmining from the pulpit against young people 
and seeming to rather enjoy his faulting, then is he 
useless, or largely so; but if so be they feel he loves 
them and feels their worth and wears their magnitude 
in his brain, then can he command them. He can front 
them toward the heavenly lights. 

It may well be the pastoral endeavor to reduce his 
points of antagonism to the lowest possible point con¬ 
sistent with the soul and body interests of the youth 
whom he seeks to save and retain saved. It is never 
wise to rasp at anything. It is specially not wise to 
fulmine at everything in sight, the baseball game, the 
football game, the nickelodeon. There are in all these 
ingredients of danger, but in themselves they are not 
bad. Amusement is virtuous and is necessary. Play is 
provided for by our God in the nature of His creation. 
Cats are not the only things that like to frisk. I have 
sometimes wished that the logic of play as seen in pup¬ 
pies and cats and bears and lions, and babies when play¬ 
ing with their toes, might penetrate the thick cuticle of 
some I have known, to whom life was so grim that a 
wintry landscape was a rather enlivening scene com¬ 
pared with life as they conceived it. Play is good! 

168 


THE PASTOR AND YOUTH. 


Only bad play is wrong. Get young people to know 
once for all that the preacher is a friend to fun and 
play, that he likes giggling himself, that sport is a 
delight to him, that games are things he has not for¬ 
gotten the attractiveness of; then, when he does fault 
certain types of pleasure, they will heed his words as 
knowing they came not from the heart of a censor, but 
from the heart of a man. It often does a preacher more 
good to go out and play ball with his young folks, or 
run races with them, or cut up didos with them, than 
to ask them to prayer-meeting, for the palpable reason 
that after such sense of frolic with him they will feel 
that where he invites them is worthy of their regard. 
Young people are pretty sensitive, and they are much 
like girls about their lovers. They do not need to be 
told. A girl knows things of that sort without being 
informed. The catalogue of evils is not so long, after 
all, if we give the matter scrutiny. To get a sense of 
the eternal rightnesses, that is the main business; and 
having a sense of the eternal tightnesses, to have a set¬ 
tled determination for conscience’ sake to do that right¬ 
eous thing, what a strength that is! and how it com¬ 
passes us about with deliverance! 

We as ministers are to bring youth fronting the 
great decision and the great strength and the great 
service, which is all spelled in one word, howbeit a proper 
name is this word: it is spelled ‘‘Jesus.” To give youths 
to feel, for feeling is evermore deeper than knowing, 
that Jesus is not a name primarily for renunciation, 
but is primarily a name for realization and expansion 
is a weighty word to utter to them. They will not soon 
169 


THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


forget it. “The expulsive power of a supreme affec¬ 
tion” is a phrase for which Thomas Chalmers is to be 
blessed forever. Christianity is possession rather than 
omission. Religion is not so much cutting off as it is 
receiving and applying. Tell such things with a glad 
voice to such as come to Church two by two, two by two. 
Talk of love as a worthy and desirable estate. Do not 
jest at it. Love is very real and very regal to all 
whose lives are touched thereby. The fraternity of 
heart which comes between preacher and preached-to, 
though he knows them not at all, is stirring as no bat¬ 
tle-trumpet is. Give those who hear you, heart. Tell 
them with a laughing voice that hard times do not hurt: 
that we are built for strenuous days: that we are not 
driftwood, chattels of the current, but boats that sail 
up-stream, and that the largest conceptions of the thing 
called life are to be learned from the Christ and are 
embodied in the Church of the Christ. 

To save young man or woman, is a strong man’s task. 
These are the unmade makers of the world. They need 
care and sympathy and wide wisdom, but mainly love. 
“He loves us,” let every preacher struggle to have that 
impression regarding his attitude be prevalent in all the 
•(cit^ where he dwells. Boys have legs and like to kick, 
why should preachers perpetually kick at football, 
when every boy not a candidate for anaemia is bound to 
tumble in that glorious heap of heads and heels Why 
is that bad.f^ And youth in manhood likes that, too. It 
has legs; and the rush, the audacity, the strength to 
resist, and the strength necessary for impact, all appeal 
to strength. “My son, be strong,” was the word of 

iro 


THE PASTOR AND YOUTH. 


a man one time—a man who loved athletics and who 
said, “I keep my body under.” 

Glory in youth and with youth. Get a natural 
leadership with them from your definite, human power 
of control. We can not scold people into the kingdom 
of God, though some seem to be very certain we can. 
We can’t; and we ought not. And youth do not need 
hectoring at forever, but lifting and showing them 
the sky into which they are lifted. Show them that 
“the life indeed,” of which the heavenly Book has spoken, 
is the life the Christ has revealed; the big life, big 
enough to give brawniest brawn and the gladdest rejoic¬ 
ing and the wildest dream room, and room forever. Tell 
them that sin is an expert in clipping the wings of life’s 
endeavors, and religion is an expert in providing an 
ample sky, and qualifying a competent courage, and 
giving just and satisfactory returns in the profits of 
being worthy and proceeding along paths which shall 
call for no retreat. 

The Christ for the youthhood of the ages, that is 
the Christ the preacher is permitted to proclaim. Whom 
if he will proclaim he will have youth following in 
Christ’s train. 

The sympathetic attitude towards youth is the 
preacher’s brainy attitude and the attitude of which his 
Master will approve. 

Thou Christ of youth, teach us some measure of 
Thy wisdom in dealing with these whom Thou hast 
greatly loved. Bring us into the thick of youth’s as¬ 
pirations, that we may be able to speak in the fervid 
language of their glowing hope, and forecast for them 

in 


THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 

somewhat of hope fulfilled, and without repressing their 
aspirings lead them to gird themselves with Thyself, 
which, when done, no hopes come to dismay. Help us 
to be so growthful ourselves that we may feel the saps 
flowing in our souls which flow in theirs. 

Prevent us, our Savior, from hasty or peevish judg¬ 
ments of these laughters and forecasts and fears and 
sturdy endeavors which are all printed in Thine own 
recollection. Make us such wise associates with these 
youth-hearts that by Thy help, to which we evermore 
must flee, we shall be the helpers of very many who 
shall by us be brought out into a wide place, we pray 
in Christ. Amen. 


172 


The Fine Art of Loving Folks. 

“Loving folks” I say because folks is a home-wordj 
and therefore a sweet word. We say “home folks,” but 
we never do say “home individuals.” Unless a man be 
a good lover of folks he has positively no business at 
all in the ministry of the Church of the Lord Jesus 
Christ. If people try him, if he secretly despises a 
crowd, if he ever in his most trivial moments and most 
private moments thinks people cheap, if in his secret 
thought as he classifies the race he has a subhead called 
“Hoi polloi” or “the mutable rake-scented many” (with 
Shakespeare), then he must forbear “this ministry” (as 
Paul calls it). If a man have a suggestion of the prig 
in his make-up he must not preach. Preaching is not 
a job for prigs: it is a job for men; and a prig is a 
good, long remove from a man. Here we must rigidly 
discriminate between substance and make-believe. It 
will not do for a man in the ministry to affect an in¬ 
terest in people which he does not possess, because that 
would be insincerity, and preachers must not be insin¬ 
cere. His value as a public commodity as well as a 
Church commodity is that men may implicitly rely on 
him, which is another way of phrasing sincerity. The 
preacher must study all back lands of his own life. What 
he says and what he does must have no altercation with 
what he truly wants to say and what he truly wants to 
do. With many the repression of an untoward mood 
173 


THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


will be substantial virtue. Not so with a preacher. A 
community can endure anything in a minister better 
than the feeling that what his lips have to say is no 
criterion of what his brain is saying. That a minister 
is withholding conviction on any given question be¬ 
comes a real crime in a leader of souls. Subtle in¬ 
sincerity is the demolition of a real citadel value in the 
ministry of Christ. Man can not fly for refuge to the 
broken wall, nor yet to the veneered wall. A politi¬ 
cian might despise people, and yet be suave and hail 
with the people whose votes he coveted. That truly is 
not high-grade politics, though it might pass for poli¬ 
tics. But for a preacher to have this soul attitude 
of undervaluing people, the whole people for whom 
Christ died, is unforgivable. His life of kindness 
and of interest in people is a feigned life; and feigning 
is the one thing against which the preacher must set 
his soul with clamped lips. “I can not let my soul pose,” 
is a motto for his interior life for every man who is 
pastor to the Lord’s flock to write with a sword-point 
on his heart. He must be true, which means that his 
procedure, whether in word or deed or thought, shall 
be a true transcript of his heart. 

“If you do not enjoy people, act as if you did,” 
will not that frame a man to larger use of cordiality? 
It might, but to a sham cordiality. A preacher who 
meets a little child and says, “I am glad to see you, 
dear,” must weigh those words. Am I glad to see this 
child? If not, then he must not say so. A preacher 
must not be oily-tongued. He must not be a palaverer. 
He must not be given to what in the vernacular is called 
174 


THE FINE ART OF LOVING FOLKS. 


‘‘soft soap”—a first-rate word for what some people do. 
But identifying all gracious speech and thoughtful ap¬ 
preciation of the real merits of those we meet with “soft 
soap” displays a penury in thought very humiliating. 
The preacher should study to say the non-vitriolic word 
and the ingratiating word, because those are the words 
in which his soul thinks aloud. That preacher-man is 
lost whom the congregation and the general public sets 
down as a palaverer. If the people grow to feel that 
the preacher says kind things because he thinks kind 
things, says appreciative things because he has appre¬ 
ciation for them, then will they feel in themselves a 
sturdy growth in self-respect forasmuch as the minis¬ 
ter thinks sweet things of them. Few things are so 
wholesome as that a preacher go from house to house 
in his Church saying appreciative things of each house¬ 
hold and of each member of the household and of other 
households. He will by so doing induce an atmosphere 
of kindness. He will reveal to each person something 
of strength for God’s business and world help, which 
usually qualifies that soul so accosted. 

A preacher must love people solely because they are 
people, not because they are from his native State, nor 
because they are from his alma mater, nor because they 
are traveled, nor because they are cultured, nor because 
they have kindred tastes, nor because they are in an all¬ 
round way congenial, nor because they are poor, nor 
because they are rich—not these are the grounds for 
a minister’s love for mankind. He must love them 
solely because they are human beings. They are world 
kinsmen of his, bone of his bone, flesh of his flesh. He 
175 


THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 

must not sham admiration for them, but must admire 
them and should love them because they are his brother 
men. They are brothers in immortality as well as 
brothers in mortality and in sin. The lover of babies 
does not love a baby because it is prinked up in dainty 
garments, nor because it is ever smiling, nor because it 
is always clean. For none of these reasons does he love 
a baby, but because it is a baby. Babies bewitch good 
women and good men. You want to get your hands on 
them because they are babies. Babies are all cute to 
the baby-lover—Chinese baby, American Indian baby^ 
pickaninny baby is always a blessed baby. This pictures 
the love of humanity which a preacher must possess. 
Human life grows drunken, brutal, infamous, yet human, 
and therefore pleading. Racial weaknesses are a real 
part of the attraction of mankind. The other day I 
saw on a train a man straight-jacketed, with ropes on 
arms and body, safely held by three strong men. To 
look at him filled a body with such pity. A fatal fas¬ 
cination was on him. He was a man in mental ruin. 
He would have solicited tears from an angel’s eyes. But 
prone as he was, and lost to all touch of brain and 
poise of will, had his mother been there she would have 
loved him, and her dear hands would have furtively 
caressed him, and her mother-heart would have sobbed 
prayer out to God, “God, save my son,” and her lips 
would have wept words, “My son! ah my dear son, 
mother’s dear boy!” Her love was not conditioned on 
her son’s reason being regnant. Her love was uncondi¬ 
tioned—he was her son. Just so must the preacher feel 
the fatal, yet glorious fascination of humanity. “These 
176 


THE FINE ART OF LOVING FOLKS. 


be men; therefore do I love them.” There the preacher 
stands. You can not jostle a man like that. He is 
not blind. He does not lie to himself, saying, “All men 
are good,” when he knows some men are good for noth¬ 
ing and other men are bad—lewdly, bitterly bad; but 
despite this leprosy they are lovely to him. 

I doubt not Princess HuFs love for Tirzah knew 
no abatement because Tirzah was a leper. Her love, 
if differing in anything, was mightier under that dis¬ 
tress. 

Some persons have a power of appeal to us which 
other persons do not have. We say, “I naturally take 
to such a person;” but that can not satisfy the demand 
on a preacher. He must have a truer hand-hold on 
life than that. He may feel the personal tug toward 
one person or another, but he can have and must have 
a love for people because they are as himself is—folks, 
just folks. 

If a preacher tries to go on the door-yard of other 
people’s lives he can enjoy it. This man loves cattle. 
You may not have the cattle trader’s instinct; but if 
that person enjoys cattle you can enjoy them because 
he does—^you can enjoy them by deputy enjoyment. 
For his sake, from his enjoyment-point you view his 
herd and have real enjoyment in it. The fact is that 
this ability to transfer viewpoints and so enjoy what 
others enjoy because they enjoy it, is the finest possible 
test of the fineness of culture. Any one can enjoy what 
he enjoys, but not every one can enjoy what another 
enjoys. My feeling is that in this, women have a beau¬ 
tiful and divine pre-eminence over men, for they so 
12 177 


THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


joyously and sympathetically and vigorously enter into 
other people’s joys, appreciations, griefs, gratifications 
—it is a consummate art, the surpassing art of the heart. 

Many men and women will lend eager attention while 
things in which they have interest are under discussion; 
but the second the conversation veers from what appeals 
to their personal likes they become obviously inattentive. 
Their faces and their attitude sink into a blank and rep¬ 
rehensible inattention. This is the very dregs of bad 
manners. Good manners may be defined as Otherness 
become operative. A preacher must be a good listener, 
not only because people usually enjoy hearing them¬ 
selves talk, but because he ought to possess an authentic 
delight in hearing people tell their likes and their dis¬ 
appointments, their ailments, their aspirations, and their 
loves. A woman doting on her husband, a husband dot¬ 
ing on his wife, a mother’s astonishing delight in her 
baby, a big boy’s aspirations toward manhood’s plans, 
a farmer’s love of his farm, and a dealer’s love of his 
store, and a newspaper man’s delight in the sight of 
his paper—these become a straight delight to any man 
who cares for humanity for its own sake. 

“Art for art’s sake,” is a shibboleth of questionable 
import, seeing so many silly people use the shibboleth. 
But “Humanity for humanity’s sake” is a sane and com¬ 
prehensive version of the passion for humanity and a 
pleasure in humanity. 

With a love for a race such as is here set before the 
thought contact with people ceases to be a bore and 
comes to be a joy. Folks are the most interesting things 
in the world. The “flower in the crannied wall” which 
178 


THE FINE ART OF LOVING FOLKS. 


caught the poet’s eyes and claimed from him a song 
wet with the rain and fragrant with the wind, will not 
be comparable for loveliness nor loneliness with the 
flower of humanity plucked out of any turn of the road 
from the waste places of humanity. A wilted sun-flower 
has lost beauty, but has not lost wonder. It was a 
watcher for the sun. That memory haunts it like music 
haunts a broken harp. 

The preacher who holds in his blood this unsophis¬ 
ticated love for humanity wiU be very human and 
humble, and will be much less prone to vitriolic assault 
on people than to tears and prayers in people’s behalf 
with groanings which can not be uttered. He will be 
a circulating heart, whose gentle warmth shall waken 
in many the long-lost wonder in the race and the long- 
forgotten joy in humanity and love for humanity. 

Once upon a time a man prone to acid judgment and 
exasperating expression concerning those he knew, who 
did not incline to many but declined from many, said 
to his pastor, “I find it hard to feel unkindly to people 
when you are around.” Then was that pastor glad and 
thanked his God, with his face wet with tears and his 
voice wet as his face. A circulating love for humanity, 
that is what a preacher must be if he is to be in any 
wise an evangel to humanity. He can not preach with 
honor who does not love to love mankind. 

If we squeeze the precious juices from Lowell’s beau¬ 
tiful ‘‘Sir Launfal” we shall find that they are just 
this—the love of whoever come our way simply because 
they do come our way. The Holy Grail is ever at the 
reach of the hand of all such ardent souls. 

179 


“The Love of Christ Constraineth Us.” 


This love for humanity is a preacher necessity, but 
is not a humanitarian incident solely. That is not the 
complete history of the matter. A drawing to humanity 
as a sociological tendency is far this side of the preacher- 
love for his kind. Some people go slumming for the 
thrill of it: some people go amongst men to make psycho¬ 
logical or literary studies just as a physician might 
gather pathological data in sickness-ridden districts. 
Sociological interest may be a very worthy or a very 
worthless interest. We shall be in deadly peril of be¬ 
coming irritated with humanity and of patronizing hu¬ 
manity unless we are committed to the passion for 
humanity. Preachers are not speculative visitors to hu¬ 
manity, nor interested spectators of human souls, nor 
condescending participants in a battle not their own. 
They are not merely blood of their blood, bone of their 
bone, pain of their pain, weakness of their weakness. 
They do not even, after the kindly human spirit of the 
poet, build their house by the side of the road, because 
there the dust from human feet clouds the sky above 
that highway, but they are girt by a mighty passion— 
“The love of Christ constraineth us.” That is the full 
biography of the love Christian ministers bring to bear 
on the human race. 

A distinguished missionary said to me one day as 

180 


“LOVE OF CHRIST CONSTRAINETH US.” 


we rode at full speed across wide reaches of American 
space; “I feel the woes of the heathen: I know the bit¬ 
ter barrenness of their lives; but this would not suffice 
to keep me among them. One gets used to heathenism 
and grows callous to its desperate tragedy. Not the 
love of man sufficeth to keep me away from my wife and 
from my children through these years. Only the love 
of Christ is competent.” His face was tender: his eyes 
were wet: his voice was vibrant: Christ was on him. 
The love for Christ is a necessity to a gigantic love 
for man. Loving Him makes for loving man. The 
passion for humanity, in the Christian sense, is begot¬ 
ten by a passion for Theos—for the Word made flesh 
that dwelt among us. 

So that preacher who cares to keep close to man 
must keep strangely close to God. The entire land¬ 
scape of preacher activity is presided over by Christ. 
He walks as seeing Him who is invisible: he talks as 
seeing Him who is invisible: he reaches a man’s hand 
of help to a man because his own hand is held in the 
hot palm of Christ, the Lord. 

On the lower side the preacher loves men because 
Christ loves them: He died for them that, whether they 
wake or sleep, they might dwell together with Him. He 
sees humanity through Jesus’ eyes. He feels His pity 
for the race. He walks, sobbing, by the side of such as 
are dear to the Lord of life and glory. I do not care 
who the man or woman is, sometimes humanity will seem 
desperately cheap unless that soul be saturated by the 
sense of the Christ love, which, knowing what was in 
man and being amazed at their unbelief, yet did not 
181 


THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


hesitate to walk straight forward to their redemption. 
Humanity did not seem cheap to Jesus: hence it must 
not seem cheap to us; and it will not, howbeit a higher 
sky than a human sky must lift its arch above man— 
the sky of love that Christ bore to all mankind. After 
that we dare not call any common or unclean. The 
stench from human bodies and the wearier stench of 
souls will not nauseate us who are living close to this 
broken heart of Christ which wept over Jerusalem, and 
over those who, breathing curses, stumble in darkened 
shamelessness toward doom. No apathy will invade the 
love of those who wear the love of Christ in the heart. 
Their hearts will bum within them as they walk 
amongst the sons of men. Christ loves them—^loves 
them all, bears with them all, died for them all, prayed 
for them all, and now ever lives to intercede for them 
all, and is building a many-mansioned house for all who 
will accept of it. In the light of this revelation we 
must love the beloved of Christ. 

Any man who will inspect his own spiritual history 
will bear record to this softening effect of the love of 
Christ for all men on his own heart and on his own 
ministrations toward all manner of men. He becomes 
in the heat of this divine passion a mother-spirit, full of 
all compassion toward the vilest and crudest and most de¬ 
bauched, repeating in his heart like a refrain, ‘‘Christ 
loves him, Christ loves himand God’s afflatus breathes 
deep in his own heart. Great love is the only adequate 
love for man for whom Jesus died for love. Nothing 
perfunctory will come of a race-love so begot. When 
a minister becomes perfunctory he is lost. He is not 
182 


“LOVE OF CHRIST CONSTRAINETH US.” 


automaton: he is man. “These are they for whom Jesus 
died,” is a motto written in tears and blood above de¬ 
bauched humanity, which seeing, they become very hu¬ 
man and very tender, and must pray with no lassitude 
in the voice, nor any bitterness, only in incalculable pity 
set to tears. 

But this view, high as it is, is but the lower half of 
the Christ relation and inspiration of our love for man. 
The wider consideration and inspiration is the love we 
bear to Christ, and not the love Christ bears to man. 
“We love him;” that love for him begets a big heart; 
and the big heart loves to love all humanity. So that 
really the only cosmopolitan spirit developed in this 
earth has been developed by the love for Christ. Aside 
from that, humanity is a poor provincial. All besides 
Greeks were to the Greeks barbarians: all besides the 
Romans were to the Romans barbarians: all besides the 
Jews were to the Jews Gentiles. This egotism makes 
races insular. Humanity is an egotist. Heathenism is 
egotism. Christianity loves a world because it loves 
God. It has acquired a spacious heart in which the 
whole earth may dwell and not yet crowd it. 

All must see how persons, when in love, become 
strangely tender to all about them. Love for one made 
with amazing directness for love for all. Love qualified 
the heart. In like, yet definitely larger fashion, love 
for Christ qualifies all who receive it. Frankly, I con¬ 
fess to being agnostic as to how any soul can love God 
and not love the uttermost parts of the earth. Love 
transcends limitations. When lovers of God, we are 
become, in a true and astounding sense, infinite. We 
183 


THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


can take the earth—aye, and the universe—to our hearts 
and still not have a full heart, much less a crowded 
heart. To love the Christ and not love the heathen world 
is a heterodoxy: it is a practical impossibility. 

As anybody who herself has a baby wants to take 
all babies in her arms, so with Christ in our love we 
wish to embrace a planet and love it back to God. Our 
lower life along the ground is tugged at by the higher 
life—^the life of God. Our love for Him sets us on the 
right track and on the world plan. “The world is my 
parish,” said one man who had learned of Christ and 

who had loved Christ. We feel the world below the 

♦ 

horizon tugging at our heart because God is tugging 
at our heart. We are meant for the sea—^the sea of 
love—^because we have loved and do love the Savior. 

And if any preacher-man finds his love for man 
growing arid, let this serve notice on him that he is 
growing unconsciously lukewarm toward Christ. To be 
close to Christ is to make us ardent to come close to 
all humankind. “The love of Christ constraineth us.” 


0 


184 


“Stir Up the Gift of God Which Is 
in Thee.” 

The attrition of education is a menace to individu¬ 
ality. For the first twenty years of life the child is be¬ 
ing worn away in personality through being educated 
in information. This accounts for educated persons be¬ 
ing so much alike, and is the history of why so many 
preachers are so little striking in personality. An ig¬ 
norant man is likely to have more individuality than 
the cultured man, because, while the latter is wealthier 
in knowledge, the former is wealthier in selfhood. Any 
one who is familiar with people to any great extent, can 
bear witness to the accuracy of this observation. Vil¬ 
lage life is more conducive to individuality than city 
life, and country life more conducive than either. In 
the crowded forest the trees and the forest shrubs are 
crowded out of their own shape and grow disfigured as 
regards their real personality and natural grace, by the 
rush they must make upward for the sun. They can 
not spread themselves into their just proportions and 
outlines. The oak, the willow, and the like, are de- 
individualized. Thus is their beauty abated and their 
wonder lost. The old English habit of trimming cer¬ 
tain evergreens into curious shapes such as a body could 
see in quaint illustrations of “John Gilpin’s Ride,” 
starved nature and starved themselves, they not being 
185 


THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


aesthetic enough to know that God knew more about ar¬ 
boriculture than they. Their crime was that they had 
slain the individuality of the tree. How much more 
are those to be condemned who slay, or by abrasion 
abate, the individuality of the soul. Just how cultur- 
istic methods and educative processes, which are cer¬ 
tainly necessary, pressing on their legitimate industry, 
the acquisition of knowledge and the attrition on in¬ 
dividuality, may be abated, no one knows. Certain we 
are that, while this world is steadily increasing in cul¬ 
ture, it is steadily decreasing in genuine personality, a 
condition which all who care for what God makes must 
look upon with genuine and even bitter regret. A man 
would not willingly go to the college to find individu¬ 
ality, but to some remote solitude, where the self might 
grow with a wild and glad freedom. Such a delicious 
book as “The Seven Dreamers” could not have been 
written of people city-grown, neither could the “Win¬ 
dow in Thrums,” nor “Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush,” 
nor yet such a book as “Bonaventure,” nor “Louisiana,” 
nor “Pierre and His People,” which are all volumes in¬ 
stinct with the wonder of personality. The people 
there are grown from the ground. 

Now, in many crafts individuality may be reduced 
or dismayed or destroyed, and no harm come to the 
occupation. The carpenter can build as good a house 
be he phlegmatic, bilious, or nervous in temperament. 
He may be a character nondescript and cast a compo¬ 
site shadow, and still build a house. So with plenty 
beside. The schoolmaster may teach Greek with as lit¬ 
tle individuality as sawdust—not teach it so well, to be 
186 


“THE GIFT OF GOD WHICH IS IN THEE.” 


sure, but teach it. That delicious Hellenist, Dr. Hyde, 
of Denver University, was all the better preceptor in 
Greek that he himself was so beautifully abundant in 
genuine individuality. But a man could train students 
along the road of the Anabasis at so many parasangs 
a day, and be unlit by any single ray of personality. 
But a preacher is otherwise. His value is that as he 
lives alone, ascends the pulpit alone, preaches alone, so 
he must at his magnitude be a solitary personality. 
He must not be disfigured so that he is anybody, nor 
everybody, but he must be regally one body, and that 
body himself. 

Individuality is the only thing the individual pos¬ 
sesses which he could patent. There is just one of a 
kind born; and one is enough. Now, to that matter 
of selfhood let each one cling with a tenacity like a 
man clings to integrity, honor, valor, life. To be like 
anybody else is a malformation: to be like everybody 
else is an actual decapitation. If a congregation is to 
hire as a preacher every preacher, they had as well hire 
an elocutionist to read other people’s sermons, because 
it is well understood that the chief preachers preach ser¬ 
mons far surpassing anything we lesser men can achieve 
in sermonic perfection. The sole reason congregations 
do hire a preacher, not an elocutionist, is that they want 
his opinion, want to see the ply of the shuttle of his 
soul. But if he be sandpapered away so that he is 
nobody in particular and everybody in general, then is 
his birthright lost irrevocably. It must be noted that 
originality once lost is never recovered. When an an¬ 
cient painting has been lost from a wall by a subse- 
187 


THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


quent daub misnamed painting, the original can some¬ 
times be recovered. So was the lost Dante picture 
found for us moderns. But when the individual is once 
overlaid by the veneer of some other body or some 
other bodies, then recovery of this lost magnificence 
there is none. For, say what you will, the only thing 
which constitutes you you, and me me, is magnificent. 
It is our real contribution to mankind. One Addison, 
one Johnson, one Lowell, one Bacon, one Elia, one 
Emerson, one Holmes, how enriching to essayistic lit¬ 
erature! Had they all been Elias or Hazlitts or Mac¬ 
aulays, what an impoverishment! 

To be an echo is not to be a contribution. The 
voice is contribution. Any hill can make an echo. “I 
am the voice,” said John; and whether he weighed the 
thing he said, we may not say, but that he said a 
weighty word regarding preacherhood, we must all al¬ 
low. I am the voice—can you say that, preacher Or 
must you in fidelity to truth say, “I am an echo and 
do n’t count 

In every school of the prophets two chairs might 
be established outside the curriculum as it now reads. 
One a professorship of books, reading for reading’s 
sake: the other a professorship of individuality—self 
for self’s sake and for man’s sake and for Jesus’ sake. 
But if it be remarked that they do now possess a pro¬ 
fessorship of elocution and oratory, then is this remark 
aside from the discussion; for such in reality do de- 
individualize—not that they mean to, but that they do. 
You can, as a rule, tell what master tutored a man in 
speech. His master’s man he is, and not his own. 

188 


“THE GIFT OF GOD WHICH IS IN THEE.” 


“What are a man’s own possessions in the realm of 
public utterance that is the valid question to put to 
the man’s own self. What are the man’s own intrinsic 
qualities.?—which, if educated, will flash out into rev¬ 
elation of power like Arthur’s excalibur—that is the 
wise question for each prospective preacher to put to 
himself. Doubtless it is very hard and next door to 
the impossible to avoid the overmastering might of such 
speakers and stylists as one admires. Yet it is possible 
and ought to be comprehended and ought to be sedu¬ 
lously cultivated. Elijah and Elisha, how good to 
have those two! 

Elisha was not eliminated by Elijah. In the Bad 
Lands in the Dakotas the picturesque quality of the 
landscape owes itself to the individuality of the buttes 
which have withstood the attrition of wind and winter 
and rain through the longest lifetime of any portion 
of America or of this globe. Consider that these lands 
are oldest of the earth, and consider that they have 
not been subject to subsidence or upheaval, but that 
they stand as they were put in the primeval era very 
long ago, and the robust personality of these forma¬ 
tions becomes thrillingly apparent. The elements of 
water, sun, calm, storm, deluge of rain, wild deluge of 
wind, have only sculptured out enduring monuments 
which assert a selfhood not made to die. To hold 
audience with these invincible assertions of individu¬ 
ality would doubtless do the average licentiate more 
good than a pilgrimage to Europe or the Orient. 
They would teach preachers-to-be the art of being 
themselves. 


189 


THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


I know a certain preacher, whom to meet is like 
meeting with a meandering stream. You know not 
what you will meet. There is in him glorious illusion. 
He refuses to be invoiced. He is a distinct contribu¬ 
tion to your catalogue of elemental forces you have met. 
He never dimmed along your horizon. He was too 
granitic, too solitary to be lost in the press of things. 
He has read widely: he has seen clearly: his faculties 
are trained: he is college-bred: he has traveled widely: 
he moves much with men, but he is just himself. He 
has the audacity to believe something, and not to swal¬ 
low all things told him. He is not scared of the bogy, 
“He is not scholarly,” which slays so many preach¬ 
ers. He is big enough to stand on his own legs with¬ 
out being jostled by the crush of things. He reads 
widely, but is not always reading “the greatest the¬ 
ological treatises of the year.” His wit is ready: 
his poise is admirable: his eyes are his own, and he 
comes at things at his own angle, which makes old 
things seem new things: he is himself, vigorous, search¬ 
ing after truth and finding it. In preaching he does 
not cull all his views from books. He can think a thing 
for himself, and really supposes himself is called of 
God to be a theologian, and so marches out right gayly 
along the road of God, and reaches God and man. 
He is no echo, but a voice. When I am with him, the 
mountain wind is blowing. 

How refreshing all this is! and what a contrast 
to many a man, whom to meet is to come into col¬ 
lision with phrasings of things which are familiar, with 
lucubrations which you have read, and with arguments 
190 


‘‘THE GIFT OF GOD WHICH IS IN THEE.” 


which are platitudes! Blessed is that man of whom 
his congregation feels, “We have for a pastor not an 
echo, but a voice.” “Take heed to thyself,” was a 
Pauline mandate, which is close kinsman to the other 
mandate, “Stir up the gift of God which is in thee.” 
Both phrasings are peremptory. Paul knew that a 
preacher-man’s first commodity is himself. He knows 
how easy it is to lose the pearl of personality. To 
keep yourself, is worth battling for. To take culture 
and thereby not to lose self; to learn what a broad 
interpretation of the Shakespearean counsel, “To thine 
own self true,” may be; to have a granite in your life 
which shall withstand wear and tear, but catch all 
lights and shadows, daylights and sunsets, as a moun¬ 
tain does,—that is worth a preacher’s while—greatly 
worth a preacher’s while. 

Blessed is that preacher whose congregation feels. 
We have for a pastor not an echo, but a voice. Take 
that for a beatitude. Ponder these two Pauline coun¬ 
sels : 

“Take heed to thyself.” 

“Stir up the gift of God which is in thee.” 


191 



Keeping Alive the Sense of Wonder, 

When wonder is dead the soul is become a dry 
bone. The grim valley of dry bones to which the 
prophet leads us is not a myth. It is a portrait of 
many, a picture painted by the sun. Bones dried by 
the sun and by the desert breath, they have lost won¬ 
der. They spread, those bones which used to climb 
and run and walk whithersoever a soul that led them 
demanded transportation on the ground. When soul 
goes away the bones stay and last when the flesh is 
worn and dried; but they are only fit to be burned to 
potash. They build no house in which the soul may 
stay. Can a soul become dry bones.?* Answer, griev¬ 
ously and truly, yes. Such souls are all about us. 
They think to live: they laugh, they weep, they chat¬ 
ter, they are wise in their own conceit, they argue, they 
assert, they do everything but live. What is their 
malady.? The true reply is, they have lost the sense 
of wonder. Nothing appears strange. They are fa¬ 
miliar with all things. They are grown blase. They 
walk stolidly among such wonders as had made Jesus, 
Prince of men, to pause and wait a while and then 
speak poetry. 

Kipling defined a certain woman in cold, deliberate 
tone, “A rag and a bone and a hank of hair.” That 
is terrific reduction to primary qualities. The poet 
192 




KEEPING ALIVE THE SENSE OF WONDER. 


drew that picture not with brush, but with sword-point. 
He etched it on a woman’s breast. But a soul devoid 
of wonder is more naked yet. No rag to clothe the 
bones’ alarming nakedness, nor any hair to fall down 
and prove a veil in behalf of modesty not yet forgot, 
but just a bone—a valley of dry bones. The valley 
is where cities thrive and build their dwellings and 
merchant houses, and where the tiller of the soil has 
harvest, and where people dwell; and the fertile val¬ 
ley where the rivers run was inhabited of ungarmented 
bones. They sprawled under the heavens, nor knew 
the heavens yearned in blurred amethyst, nor that the 
sunset overturned its wine along the trailing clouds. 
Poor bones, which once were men! But can not any¬ 
body who has used his ears and eyes answer without a 
moment’s hesitation that he has seen veritable hosts 
which in the total no valley could contain, who were as 
blind to blue of sky and drench of sunset’s crimson as 
if they had been bones bleached and tumbled on the 
ground.^ They know no wonder; nothing bade them 
stand. Better to be smitten with fear and have a 
horror of voices such as the ghost of Hamlet’s father 
made under ground in sepulchral tones, commanding, 
“Swear, swear!” so that Hamlet and Marcellus and 
Horatio walked across a human voice and fairly tram¬ 
pled on a human soul until white fear frosted their 
temples white,—better that, I say, than an uneventful 
ground and a life where nothing happens. 

We are in deadly peril of things understood. We 
are likely to sit down under the greening tree and never 
catch the miracle which turns winter branch and trunk 
13 193 


THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


into a bower of perfumed blossom and transfigured 
leafage. When Charles Darwin recorded with a pang 
of regret that music and Shakespeare had been dear 
delights to him, but now they delighted him no more, 
he did but say his sense of wonder was coffined. We 
are dwellers in the regions of explanations. Every¬ 
thing has had its explanatory clause, and we are be¬ 
fogged by this. If asked what holds fiery suns and 
endless systems and the wandering and far-going 
comets on their lonely wa3^s, the sapient will reply, 
“Why, gravitation,” and thinks himself to have given 
a sage reply, whereas he only christened a mystery. 
What is gravitation? It is the power that holds worlds 
in transit, is the sagacious reply of those scientific souls. 
But he defines in a circle and, traveling, thinks him¬ 
self to have made progress. He has actually taken a 
little ride on a merry-go-round. Gravitation is a name 
for a fact, but a fact of undiminished mystery; such 
tragic mystery (to my thought) that we have always 
to face it with alarm and fear, more than Macbeth 
knew in fronting murdered Banquo. Newton gave a 
physical fact a name, but gave it no explanation. We 
are where we were. We fail to get on. The fact still 
breaks our spirits with its unspeakable wonder, and we 
must still wonder how all those central suns are hung 
upon nothing. Nothing subtracts from that amazing 
wonder. 

To sit smugly down and erase wonder from a uni¬ 
verse by giving mystery a name, is simply incredible 
dullness. The wonder of this universe refuses to abate. 
For years protoplasm was the childish word lisped in 
194 


KEEPING ALIVE THE SENSE OF WONDER. 


our ears as the uneventful unit of life. This was the 
base of all living matter, and reaching it we had come 
to the bathybius (as Huxley, the knowing, named 
it), which explained all things. It was next discovered 
that protoplasm was not the simple base of all combi¬ 
nations, but that each form of life had its own form 
of protoplasm. Protoplasm is as complex, as varied, 
as life forms. In vain we try to slip the leash of 
the wonderful. 

Men would crush miracle out. They have not suc¬ 
ceeded. Miracle is wonder: and the universe is a mir¬ 
acle. Cogent, perspicuous, profound old Butler has 
never been overthrown when he argued that if miracles 
were a departure from the existing order of things, 
then, when things began to be and the-what-was-not 
come to be the-what-is, then a miracle was wrought. 
This is a rock no seas can drown, no icebergs crush. 
A miracle is a thing beyond us. In actuality, this 
whole world and the world to come of things is thus 
become a miracle. Who will explain anything? Who 
will explain a baby’s birth, or a mother’s love, or the 
eventful phenomenon of sex, or the perpetuity of a 
plant in selfhood, or the vitality with which a starbeam 
keeps its journey until it journeys across universal 
space,—who will tell about these? Many will talk 
about it: none will tell about it. 

Men who are to be prophets to souls must not be 
befogged with definitions nor dethrone wonders from 
their position. We are not great by virtue of the 
things we can explain, but by virtue of the things we 
can not explain. A cow has pretty eyes, as quiet as 
195 



THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


a pool of quiet water, but uneventful eyes. There is no 
touch of wonder in their dreamless depths. The eyes 
are therefore soulless. A child’s eyes are fairly light¬ 
ning. They are to see things: they are the windows 
of the brain, and bewilder like a play of swords of fire. 
An explained world is a world we could not be hired to 
stay in. An inexplicable world will keep us entranced 
like those who watch for a new planet to swim into 
their ken. Blessed be God for the wonder of things! 
No thing can have its recipe written out. Evolution¬ 
ists are becoming a trifle chary in explanatories. Heat 
by expansion moves locomotives and steamships, mul¬ 
tiplies the lifting power of the denizens of the earth until 
it is as if inhabited by a hundred times its population— 
this fact we note. We have been hauled by this ex¬ 
cessive expansion of heat, have been served by it, have 
in fact become quite at home with it and familiar with 
this amazing Goliath. But understand it? Why, no. 
Why heat does expand until it flings up sea valleys 
into ten thousand feet of sky, that we have not at all 
penetrated. It does it, that is everything we know. 
And we shall likely know no more until God in His 
heaven becomes our Preceptor in dynamics. 

Now, a preacher’s credential is that he is alive to 
wonder. Everything seems strange to him, like a city 
to a country child. He looks and lauds: he wonders 
and applauds. He is overarched with the blue sky of 
a scheme too large for him and breathed upon by 
the west wind of wonder. He looks all things in the 
face with a keen delight. The edge is never worn 
from his surprise. The result is that he is always inter- 
196 


KEEPING ALIVE THE SENSE OF WONDER. 


ested, and who is interested will in turn be interesting. 

He goes about, one unqualified delight. How good it 
is to take around a boisterous (ci^ a man who has - 
spent his life amid the quiet of the fields and hear the 
voice of his surprised delight in everything he sees!" ' 
“How fine that is,” he says to everything. How easy 
that relative is to entertain. But if so be that relative 
to be entertained has been everywhere, or thinks he has 
been, and slaps you in the face with the open hand of 
his remark, “You know that does very well for here, 
but when a man has been to so and so it is rather 
flat,”—may we all be delivered from such relatives! 
Being dead to wonder, a man dies. His eye becomes 
listless. To have seen Will Shakespeare go anywhere 
would have been like reading a book of revelation, be¬ 
cause all he saw beckoned to him like the sea. It was 
a wonderland and was eventful. Every step was a de¬ 
light. In Yellowstone Park the traveler decides, when 
the circuit is completed, the wonder is not one thing 
nor everything, but that every few rods the vista 
changes. It is the most eventful journey, I candidly 
think, anybody will ever take. You are always on the 
threshold of the new. Torrent, crag, forest, beaver- 
meadow, beaver-dam, canyon, eagle nest on eagle eyrie, 
geysers of terror which had given Dante lessons in 
Inferno, snowy peaks,—processions of them, solitudes 
of pine, snow drift which piled the Divide of the con¬ 
tinent, and where alpine flowers kindled their radiant 
lights, yellow dog-tooth violets giving new sense of the 
versatility of God, and sea crag set amidst the voices of 
swift waters, long slant of pines, that climb the Great 
197 




THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


Divide, fleet-footed deer or bronzed buffalo, the sham¬ 
bling bear, the far, high, glorious, effortless flight of 
the eagle, the swift, downward rush of the water of 
the wide river, the sullen gathering of the lake into a 
narrow mountain pass dusk at noon, the leap of wa¬ 
ters over a precipice twice as high as Niagara, the 
moaning mountain winds amongst the mountain pines, 
the glassy cliff, the infernal mud geysers casting up 
forever the slime and dirt, the solitude sublime, the 
woodland steeps where no ax has swung in the depre¬ 
dation of forests,—the unexpectedness of things, that 
is what will keep the national preserve a landscape of 
wonders till the last sunset casts its melancholy light 
upon the earth. 

To the preacher—the right preacher—^the earth is 
like that park of wondrous allurement. The child, 
shuffling old age palsied and grown blind,—souls grip 
him and will not let go their hold. Such a man never 
tires of things or of folks or of doing. There is no 
routine in his career. He is living on the edge of 
miracle. Gentle spring will come and push burly, brag¬ 
gart winter out and set the windflower and the trail¬ 
ing arbutus blooming, where winter trampled with his 
freezing feet and thought to trample all bloom out. 
He will never weary of the spring. Each day, all 
days, will evoke his praise. He will sing old psalms 
of ecstasy to God because God hath done such things 
and does them by persistent plan. 

The preacher will be at wonder how God shuts 
angry winter out and makes the gentle spring at bird 
song, conqueror. How sweet the world is, and how 
198 


KEEPING ALIVE THE SENSE OF V^ONDER. 


wonder stays! No days, no places, no people will vex 
him when he is “doulos” of wonder as Paul was “doulos” 
of Christ. 

When he goes and where he goes the sky will be 
high above his soul. He watches that amethystine 
arch and marvels that so wide an archway never crashes 
in: he sees the crowds of people and peers in every 
face through sh^r exhilaration, wanting to follow 
those strange souls; he sees a mother with her babe, 
and is dumbfounded by it, as if he saw a haloed Ma¬ 
donna crooning to her child; he sees love dawn and 
reverently bows his heart in gratitude and acknowl¬ 
edgment to God, who has created such loveliness and 
poetry; he watches strong men work day in, day 
out for years, with no complaint, and only gladness 
at having work to do and some one to work for, 
and the preacher breaks out into a hallelujah; he 
sees life succeeding and rejoicing in its activities; he 
sees death, the cold hand, the blanched cheek, and 
the hushed voice and sobs—O Death and Life, you are 
twain mysteries! He sees a leaf, a tree twig, the bark 
of a willow or an oak, the drop of rain, the solace 
of the dew or night or dawn or twilight, the stars 
new lit, the moon at earliest crescent, the seatides, the 
woods in autumn flame, the drop of moisture gather¬ 
ing on a fern frond on the far edge of a sandy cliff, 
unknowing of the sea, and yet which leans and drips 
and with the pathetic hunger of the dewdrop for the 
sea, goes out on the sea quest; the going of a woman 
with her lover away from all, yet being with him being 
with all; the flowering of the child toward woman- 
199 


THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


hood or manhood, the decayed faculties of thought, 
the dying faculties of sinning souls, the fact of prayer, 
the power of prayer, the hunger for prayer, the house 
of God with the people gathering, and the baptism of 
the child, the heartache of the bereft, the clinging to 
the past, the widow’s weeds, the fitful smile, the copious 
tears, the haunting loneliness of autumn, the sad mi¬ 
gration of blackbirds south in autumn and the re¬ 
turn of birds at spring—these all bewilder him. He 
is sore bestead with the unmixed wonder of the world. 
Were it his first day on earth things would not be 
stranger nor more alluring nor more fair. 

Such a man will preach with a touch of wonder on 
his voice. He will minister at a strange, high altar. 
He will not drivel about miracles being unphilosophical. 
He will see that in this universe of God miracles are 
customary. He will feel the untiring miracle of the 
forgiveness of sins which God is performing a thou¬ 
sand times in every day. The resurrection of tTesus 
and ourselves will appear not abnormal, but sublimely 
normal. He will know that “Christ could not be holden 
of it.” Death is dead. Life shall live for evermore. 

“His name shall be called Wonderful.” The 
preacher will know what that means without any one 
to give him exegesis of the passage. This wonder¬ 
ful world can be kinged over only by the King whose 
name is Wonderful. And the King must necessarily 
be a wiser and wider wonder than the Kingdom. When 
Prince Ferdinand was at toil, put on him by seeming 
surly Prospero, and Miranda, coming by made spring a 
lesser loveliness, the Prince replied to the advent of the 
200 


KEEPING ALIVE THE SENSE OF WONDER. 


maid, “O you wonder, whether you be maid or no.” 
“No wonder, sir, but certainly a maid,” was what the 
girl said, waiting for a husband. But what might 
have been said by other than Miranda herself was, “A 
wonder, sir, but certainly a maid.” All who dwell be¬ 
neath this canopy are wonderful. 

This earth-land, what is its name? Answer, This 
earth-land’s name is Wonderful. These inhabitants, 
what name wear they? Answer, The name of this race 
is Wonderful. And this land’s King, what is His title? 
Answer, This King of this wondrous earth-land and 
its wondrous inhabitants. His title is Wonderful. And 
what is yon gate, like a gateway builded of dewdrops 
in the sun, stately as heaven? Answer, Yon gateway 
is called Wonderful. Its other name is Resurrection. 

O preacher, walk through this realm of wonder 
with the wonder-wind fanning thy bare brow. Thou 
art kinsman of this land of God, this Beulah land 
where the beatitudes forever fall, enchanting music, 
from the lips of the age-long Beatitude, the Christ, 
whom seeing wise souls make ecstatic proclamation, 
“Wonderful!” 

Preacher, venture into this land of wonder where 
Christ shall greet thee at the gate and lead thee through. 

Lord, we bless Thee that Thou art Thou and we 
are we. Thou, the Wonderful, art Elder Brother unto 
us and we are younger brothers unto Thee. We must 
learn to be astonished. Lead us unto Thy holy hill, 
where all things finite open calmly out into the infinite. 
Nothing is common here. The woodroad flower, the 
wayside hut, the wildwood, and the winged things, all 
201 


THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


are wonders. Help us to know that, O Christ, Thou 
Wonderful! Keep close to me, that while Thy hand 
rests on my naked pulse Thy sense of wonder shall 
creep like a whisper along my listening palm, and all 
things shall stand before my soul’s eyes transfigured 
and fit to be set to everlasting song. Hear me, O 
Christ. Amen. 


202 


Pollen for the Mind. 

Nothing in nature, intricate as nature is, is more 
fascinating, if so fascinating, as the cross fertilization 
of plants. In his volume on that theme Charles 
Darwin touched the high tide of his intellectual 
achievement. The topic is positively weird. Doubt¬ 
less evolutionary writers on the theme have been ex¬ 
cessively fanciful, as evolutionists uniformly are, but 
when all such subtractions are made, the fact remains 
that a plant is not sufficient unto itself. “No man 
liveth unto himself,’’ is a true saying of souls of men, 
but “no plant liveth unto itself,” is as true a saying 
in the domain of growing things. God is dead set 
against self-sufficiency—is what nature totally has to 
say. God is Founder of and Favorer of a correlated 
universe. And that in the fertilization of His flowers 
and plants He employs as unsuspected workmen the 
bees and butterflies and humming-birds and winds, de¬ 
coys them as if to avoid paying them wages, is a thing 
qualified to make all brains bow their knees to Him, 
who is God over all blessed for evermore. On His least 
momentous concerns, God lets loose His most intricate 
appliances. Of the series of staggering words which 
must be pronounced to cover the landscape of flower 
and corn and cereal and tree, the magic word is pollen. 
203 


THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


A field of corn is at luxurious growth. And noth¬ 
ing in God’s growths is finer for the eyes than a field 
of maize springing toward lavish harvest. Not even 
the palm is statelier. The profuse poetries of vege¬ 
table growth are here at summer noon. The tall, erect 
stalk, stately as a grenadier, a blade like a crusader’s 
sword, with a depth of green not possible either to 
eulogize or characterize, and a plume cresting its erect 
stalk until a cornfield looks like the advance of some 
exceeding army. When the ear shoots out, with its 
silk delicate as a baby’s curls and fit for caressing, 
then is the tassel at its hail prime, and the pollen from 
the tasseled corn rains fertility down upon the silk, 
where it is caught like dust in a baby’s hair, and the 
poetry of the pollen is thrown into the white light of 
the August day, so a world may behold how God does 
with His pollen for His plants. All sorts of stimu¬ 
lative suggestions are hidden in this mystery of the 
pollen. 

The winds are ministers for the pollen on the corn 
as the wild bee is servant for the pollen on the red 
clover. If no pollen from the tassel falls on the silk, 
if by reason of drought the tassel develops its pollen 
before the silk has appeared, then will there be a field 
of earless ears. Pollen must be had. 

The preacher’s brain and heart and energy need 
pollen no less than the com. He can not, in a wisest 
sense, work for it. For so much sweat of brain you 
can not count on so much crop of thought. All minds 
that deal in inspirations know this. Poets have their 
moods. The afflatus comes or delays. He can not 
204 


POLLEN FOR THE MIND. 


compel the inspiration. Work is mechanics; and poetry 
is not mechanics, just as preaching is not mechanics. 
The preacher is not a shaper of potter’s vessels; he 
is a dreamer, a solicitor of a vision, and a climber up 
the dark stairs of night, if peradventure he may see 
the miracle of a prevailing dawn. He can not com¬ 
mand the sermon, but must solicit the sermon. 

His wisdom is going where he may get pollen on 
his brain and energy. Does any one smile grimly at 
the suggestion that a preacher is out a-pilgriming 
for pollen “Let him dig, dig, dig,” says the hard- 
and-fast brother, this man who thinks sermons are laid 
up like a brick wall, hence stick to trowel and mor¬ 
tar and brick and you will get on well. It is not my 
mood to argue, but to dissent—dissent entirely. No 
word is spoken against work. The preacher can not 
be lazy. It would shame God to have a lazy preacher 
in His vineyard, tarnishing with his touch the frost 
on the purple grape clusters. But preaching is far 
past work. Preaching is inspirational. It is a waft¬ 
ing of the wind of God, the blowing of the heavenly 
winds across the far and star-strown spaces, and blow¬ 
ing strangely sweet and quickening along the prairie 
of the heart. There will be preaching then! Working 
at sermons is not always the best way to make ser¬ 
mons. Leaving sermons alone is frequently the best 
use of time to produce sermons of unusual girth and 
manliness and meaning. Those who in all their in¬ 
tellectual history never forget that they are preachers 
are on the wrong path. It is not the footpath of peace, 
nor the footpath to the sea. All larger things have 
205 


THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


a sense of vagabondage about them. Preaching is the 
largest of large things. It has a freedom as of the 
sky. It, like a swallow, is pilgrim of the air. The 
com silk gathers harvest to its ear of incipient com 
by being in the path of the wind when the pollen 
blows. The preacher might well do as witfully as the 
silly com. Preaching is in a regard like the kingdom 
of God, which cometh without observation. Of Beecher 
it is set down how, when his mind was as empty as 
a hay-mow in spring, that he would go to the Brook¬ 
lyn Ferry and ride to and fro looking in the faces of 
the passengers and out upon the river, crowded with 
sea-going boats. He was out when the pollen might 
be blowing. Wise preacher-poet that he was! and the 
winds blew pollen on his soul. He came back qualified. 

Doing things and going whithers totally discon¬ 
nected from preaching is doing wisely for a man in 
the preaching business, because pollen may be there. 
Going from home to help a brother in a night of re¬ 
vival stress is not only doing the brotherly thing and 
putting your oar into waters where the lean of your 
strength may row a soul to God, but such going does 
gather pollen. Just how, we may not determine, though 
the fact is apparent. Those preachers who say with 
a touch of martyrdom in their confession that they 
never leave their charges, are saying a thing largely 
unfit to commend itself to the wise. A man will serve 
his charge better who does go away from it now and 
then, because he comes back with pollen; and pollen 
begets the harvest. Sometimes an idle day, a saunter 
where the roads dim into pathlessness and lose them- 
206 


POLLEN FOR THE MIND. 


selves in the shadows by the windings of a stream, or 
sitting on a moving train and looking at the faces 
of the passengers or at the wild dance of the distant 
woods, which seem to stagger like Bacchantes from 
the moving of the train, or watching the panorama 
of the marching landscape as the train flashes past— 
an idle day when you let the mind go as you would 
free a bird from the cage and let it fly at its own will— 
such a day will have redemption. Thoughts come. 
Some men deny that. They think nothing comes. 
They think to dig thoughts like you dig potatoes. 
Such is not the fact. Spring comes, love comes, God 
comes, and Christ comes. Larger things are forever 
advents. The superior event is an epiphany. In that 
haunting Miltonic line, 

“The thoughts that wander through eternity,** 

we are turned out with a landscape of eternity in time, 
which is thought-haunted, and mayhap some of those 
brawny immortalities shall cross our path while we are 
taking our solitary way. 

The psychologists have found out strangely little 
about our souls; the new psychologists have found out 
strangely less. This is not to flout them; they have 
doubtless done their best. But the older psychology 
is the wiser psychology. Recent psychology is brag¬ 
gart, like Captain Dalgetty. We have so little after 
all through their grim knockings at the door of our 
mentalities. We know not why thought comes, nor 
whence. There are wide ethers in the dome of the 
soul’s sky as in the dome of the blue sky where God 
207 


THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


sets His sun and moon; and of these we know so little. 
Of that sky where Emily Dickinson flitted like a ves¬ 
per-sparrow, what can we say.^^ Her voice, sweet as the 
song the vesper-sparrow sings when day is spent and 
night comes strangely and sweetly on—^her voice we 
hear, but whence she fetched her thoughts, strong as 
an archangel’s wings, we can not answer with authori¬ 
tative speech. Trust to the sky. Do not try to meas¬ 
ure its height of reach or width of beam, but wonder 
in it. Let it compass you—^the sky of God, the blue, 
fair sky, but that wider, higher sky of soul, the sky 
which is God, walk out with Him, in Him, and when 
the gentle winds do blow or the wild gales rock the 
cedars with tempest, then and there shall come pollen 
on thy soul and thou shalt be as one visited of God. 
Why should we rasp about the laws for such things 
when the ways are open and opulent with ideas? Great 
thoughts come. I fully believe that. To be sure, all 
we have habited our souls to be, all the wide wonder 
of our thinking selves, all the knowledge which we have 
acquired through toil of scholarship, all our acquaint¬ 
ances with man and history and God—all these will 
help, but not all these will explain. 

As a man is startled in the dark when wandering 
on a sea cliff by a sea gull leaping, white velocity, 
past his face, even so do thoughts come with an unex¬ 
pectancy akin to fear. Sometimes we flercely collide 
with thoughts and are often crushed by them; but 
blessed be such a catastrophe. Now, brothers, when 
men begin to preach they are on the highway called 
eternity, a highway not explained as yet; and on it 
208 


POLLEN FOR THE MIND. 


are majestic presences and strange potencies of a realm 
unknown which, passing, leave us a touch and a whisper 
and then we elaborate whisper or touch into a psalm, 
into a magnificat, into a sermon which breaks men’s 
hearts and makes them clamor, “I have seen the Lord.” 


14 


209 



The Search for Souls. 


Holman Hunt’s picture, ‘‘The Light of the 
World,” is a thrillingly noble picture, for one can 
scarcely look upon it without tears. It means some¬ 
what, we can not answer what. It sets us seeking the 
meaning we feel sure the poet had who painted the 
portrait; but we know that it has other meaning than 
even the painter had, crowding his soul with glory. 
Such pictures are epochs in a soul. They are not 
froth on the wave; they are the sea which owns the 
wave. 

To any one who loves Jesus can anything touch¬ 
ing Him be other than compelling.? Jesus, with a 
sheep in His bosom; Jesus, with a lamb in His arms; 
Jesus, with babes clinging to His neck; Jesus, with a 
lost world on His heart; Jesus, with a prodigal cling¬ 
ing to His knees; Jesus, with a lost Magdalene wash¬ 
ing His feet with her tears and wiping them with the 
hairs of her head, weeping, weeping, and Him suf¬ 
fering her, pitying her, forgiving her, lifting her 
up to the calm, triumphant love of God in Christ,— 
Jesus, with a lantern out looking up a lost man— 
that is the portrait of Holman Hunt’s “The Light of 
the World.” But that strange Journeyer is out look¬ 
ing for us all—for us all. “He giveth His life for 
210 


THE SEARCH FOR SOULS. 


the sheep.” The lost sheep must be hunted up; the lost 
man and the lost woman must be hunted up, and Jesus 
is on their track; and when the hunt for the lost man 
is concluded, lo! Jesus is ever standing at MY door, 
and always, seeking His lost, finds me! 

I read once of the frontiersman who was looking 
for his own lost child, and saw leopards in the night 
neighboring a certain cabin in the wood, and his heart 
was wild within him, and was he not on the quest for 
his own lost boy, and could he tarry for something 
other than that supreme quest.? But, thank God, his 
better fatherhood prevailed—^he stopped; he slew the 
beasts; he went in and found his own boy! 

How pathetically personal Jesus always is. Imper¬ 
sonality never hides its lean face behind Jesus’ seamless 
garment. The folks. He is after them. He is stay¬ 
ing with them; He is boarding round with them. We 
have no knowledge of His ever stopping at a hostel 
save once, and then there was no room for Him save 
in the cattle stalls. 

With a lantern, standing at the dark door and 
waiting—that is Jesus. Whose dark door is this.? Sob 
it out, each heart, “My dark door.” The Light of 
the world seeking for the lost of the world. This is 
an object lesson. The great Pastor is out seeking for 
souls. If we were let name Him for whom God Him¬ 
self prepared a name, we would christen Him the 
Searcher for souls. Those parables of lost things, the 
lost money, the lost sheep, the lost man, were told, I 
think, principally for pastors to hear. Hunting the 
money, hunting the sheep, hunting the boy—and find- 
211 



THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


ing the sheep, the money, and the boy! If this 
Searcher for souls had left the money lost, the sheep 
lost, the boy lost, we must have died of heartbreak. 
“Lost^ lost, lost,” I hear the dreary dirge bell ring 
like a bell upon a windy and wintry ocean shore— 
“Lost, lost, lost;” and “Found, found, found,” the 
bells from all the starry steeples sing, “Found, O 
found!” Jesus is here. He searches and finds. 

“ Ring out wild bells to the wild sky.** 

The lordliest man of all this earth had for his oc¬ 
cupation the searching for souls. This pastor parable, 
the parable of the quest of souls and the parable of 
the finding of souls. The pastor Christ is both Searcher 
for souls and Finder of souls. We are astonished 
into thought: we must not omit to search for souls. 
The night grows late: the preacher is weary: the day 
is Sunday: there have been various services apart from 
the routine of the church vocation: the dead have been 
laid in the ground: the sick have been seen and prayed 
with: and the night is late, so late, and the call comes, 
and gladly, very gladly, out into the dark and the 
sleet and the wind goes the sub-pastor, the sub-searcher 
for souls, because there is a man dying some place 
in the city and he knows not the road, but this dying 
man has heard this preacher sometime and wants him; 
and the preacher goes. You could hear him laugh 
out loud if you were with him, he has his lantern (if 
we hold to the symbol in the picture painted of the 
master painter), and is out seeking for souls. He 
comes: the house is still save for sobbing: the invalid 
212 


THE SEARCH FOR SOULS. 


sleeps: they sob: and the searcher goes in quietly; and 
the dying man, the lost man a-dying, opens his eyes 
without being wakened. “I am come,V says the searcher 
for souls. “Is—it—yet—^too—late.?” the lost man 
breathes heavily. “Late, so late,” the searcher says, 
“but Jesus, Searcher for souls, came with me, and His 
lamp is lit, and it is not too late.” And the lost man 
sobs with faint breath a-whisper, “Thank—God—not— 
too—late—found,” and puts his wet face against the 
preacher’s heart. “Found—Jesus—hath—found—me 
—even—me.” And the lit lamp of the great Searcher 
for souls is shining the lost man full in the face. And 
the preacher is holding a dead face against his heart! 
O who would weary in this search for souls.? What¬ 
ever else the preacher does, and he does many things, 
multitudinous items are in his year-long task, this one 
thing he does supremely, he searches for the lost boy 
and sometimes finds the lost boy, and then he hears 
the ringing of the heavenly bells, and sometimes they 
sound very clear, like bells chiming across the snowy 
dead of night. 

This world is a found world. This world is a lost 
world. These are the articles of the soul-seeker’s creed. 
Credo—^this world is utterly lost. Credo—^this world 
is utterly found. Sin is a lurid word in the pastor’s 
vocabulary; he did not put it there; God did not put 
it there; the Church did not put it there; Christian¬ 
ity did not put it there; it just is there. The preacher 
invents no issues, but he denies no facts. This is a 
world whose landscape would be as beautiful as Para¬ 
dise but for one baleful occupant; and that baleful 
213 


THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


occupant is Sin. Death is not earth’s menace: sin is 
earth’s sole menace. Sin gone, earth would be fair 
as the island valley of Avillion. Death runs a ferry; 
sin runs a hell. Where is hell.^ Hell is where sin is, 
in the mansion, in the hut, in the places of ill-fame 
innumerable, there is hell. Sin is putting its foul hands 
on virtue and fouling it; sin is debauching boy and 
girl and youth and maid and city and country and com-- 
monwealth and continent and planet. “Sin, I hate 
thee.” Say that, preacher, say that. Hurl that defiance 
loud as a thunder summons. Sin is responsible for every 
infamy, for every vileness, for every flaunting shame¬ 
lessness, for every staggering,, vomiting drunkenness, 
for every jail, for every scaffold, for every house of ill- 
repute, for every manacle, sin is responsible for the 
death of God! Sin hewed out the cross and sin set 
it up and nailed the Lord of Glory on it. As said 
Preacher Peter once, “Whom ye with wicked hands 
slew.” Sin—that is the world’s fatal malady. Every 
preacher must know that, know it so by heart that he 
can not forget it, else he can not preach. He might 
remark aesthetically or sociologically and let sin slip 
from its horror in his soul. But preach.?^ Why, that 
hot iron must impale his soul if he would preach. Sin 
is this world’s tragedy. 

Poverty.? Why, no, that is not a calamity. Pen¬ 
ury.? Why, penury is usually the wages of sin. In 
America we could care for all penury with laughing 
ease if sin were put out of business. The Bureaus of 
Charity in every large city are footing the bills of 
sin. The hard heart, the lewd heart, the criminal 
214 


THE SEARCH FOR SOULS. 


heart, the penurious heart, the craven heart, the bleak 
heart, the black heart is always sub-title to the main 
title, which is “The sinful heart.” 

If the preacher gets clear on this it will be sur¬ 
prising how clear it will keep his head on so many 
things which seem not relevant and included. It will 
set him right on flimsy methods of reformation of cur¬ 
rent evils. He will know that many of the nostrums 
for social amelioration are quack nostrums. Allowed, 
that they are well meaning; they are insufficient. 
They are cutaneous, while sin is of the heart. Human 
wrong-doing is not a matter of ignorance; it is a 
matter of vice—the evil heart, the bad heart. A new 
environment will cleanse it.?^ Neighborhood houses will 
disinfect it? New tenements well lit and with a bath will 
remedy it? A coffee house will cure the saloon habit? 
No. Once know this world’s malady is sin and these 
superficial methods will not delude the preacher. They 
would be laughable, but that they are tragical in their 
incapacity. Soapsuds will not wash away sin. All 
these attempts are superficial. They ignore the malady. 
They do not listen to Christ. He knew what ailed the 
world: He did not die for fun. He died for bitter 
earnest. The blood of Jesus Christ can cleanse from 
all sin—this remedy is adequate and has been supplied. 

Socialism—that will make things right? Why, no; 
there can be no equality till sin is deposed. The fact 
of sin held to rigorously will keep a preacher from 
waste of faculties in insufficient remedies like these. 
Cancer is in the blood. Sin is a cancer. Therefore 
must there be a blood remedy. 

215 


THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


Then there are all the cults, and every one of them 
has a defective doctrine of sin. They ignore it; they 
snub it; they look at it with a sickly smile; they 
blandly say, ‘‘All are good, only trust them;” and his¬ 
tory and biography and drama and fiction all laugh 
their folly down. An inadequate realization of sin 
will Inevitably beget incompetent remedial agencies. 
Playing the Hindu will not relieve the diabolism of 
society, will not take the stench out of any diabolism. 
Ignoring facts is not a sane method of renovation. 
Engineers bridge rivers, they do not ignore them; 
they build snow sheds; they do not ignore snow. The 
stem doctrine of sin will keep a preacher from play¬ 
ing the fool with any of these multitudinous clans 
which have that for an occupation. 

And there is another easy way to treat sin, that 
is to lie about it, say you have n’t it, and you will not 
have it. This is the Christian Science method. “God 
is good,” is a formulary under which all vice can ply 
its wicked trade. I do not wonder the doctrine has 
devotees. It is so easy for you to forgive your own 
sins. You save the bitterness of repentance though 
you lack the decency to be ashamed. You construct 
a shelter for every form of lewdness, dishonesty, and 
indecency by saying all is good. Your formulary 
destroys virtue instead of destroying vice. If all is 
good then nothing is bad, lying is as right as truth, 
and free love is as righteous as domestic purity. The 
pastor who has the Christ doctrine of sin will be im¬ 
mune to such undigested rituals for righteousness whose 
end is as certain to be license as certain can be, be- 
216 


THE SEARCH FOR SOULS. 


cause this easy theory is very old and has bom fmit- 
age of immorality time and time and times again. Sin 
is sin and sin is here, and sin rots the body and rots 
the soul and goes on doing so whoever trifles with it 
or ignores it. Sin is our terrific malady, and yet sin 
(so rich is the grace of God toward us) brought the 
Savior; when we were in sin Christ died for us. 

Men and women sin. “They love darkness better 
than light, because their deeds are evil.” That is 
Jesus’ view of the situation. He was called Jesus be¬ 
cause He was to save His people from their sins. How 
abruptly accurate is this entire system of Christianity. 
It denies no fact of human nature nor history. It 
denies no fact, but meets the terrible condition with 
a Christ and Savior and a Lord mighty to save, affirm¬ 
ing with triumphant voice, “Where sin abounds grace 
doth much more abound.” So are we saved from de¬ 
feat. So are we saved to transport. “Now unto Him 
who washed us from our sins with His own blood,” is 
what the redeemed in heaven sing; and they probably 
know what happened to them. 

Here is a whole world very fair, given over to 
trespasses and sin—lost, lost, utterly lost; and the 
pastor must seek and save them that are lost. He 
has a remedy because he has a Christ. Week-day and 
Sunday the pastor is to seek the lost for God. By 
hazard and holy fidelity he is to seek and bring the 
lost home on his heart to God. On Sunday he should 
never close any service without inviting the unsaved 
to Christ. He should invariably open the doors of 
the Church. As pastor I never omitted that propriety. 
217 


THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


As proof of the honest intent of the service, the seeker 
should be given the opportunity to unite with the 
Church. God has been calling him; his heart may be 
tender; her heart may be tender; hearts may never 
be so tender again; and now is the accepted day, and 
now is the day of salvation. Omit not the cast of the 
net. This does not mean a show of hands; this means 
a show of hearts. “With the heart man believeth 
unto salvation.” Let the congregation know that you 
believe your own gospel, that you are on the track 
of the lost boy and the lost girl and the lost man and 
the lost woman, that to-night or this morning mercy 
has an open heart, and that there is no impediment 
betwixt them and Christ. “Come to Jesus just now.” 

Then in the week in going from house to house, 
in passing from office to office, from store to store, 
and farm to farm, still bring this same ministry. 
With adroitness, bend men and women toward the sur¬ 
render to Christ. One day is as good as another for 
that holy attempt; and one place is as good as an¬ 
other. I have been privileged to see men surren¬ 
der to God on the street car and on the street, and 
women surrender in their homes, and men and women 
surrender in the aisles of the Church and while speak¬ 
ing to the minister at the chancel at the service close. 

“The night cometh when no man can work,” let 
that thought haunt the preacher’s activities so that 
he shall seek the lost with something of that solemn 
yet joyous fidelity which Jesus displayed in that behest 
of God. 


218 


The Preacher—A Mystic. 

All greatest preachers are mystics. They are in 
their finer selves dwellers in the landscape of dreams. 
This does not mean they are skyey or remote; but 
though they walk on the ground they are dwellers in 
the sky. They come down; they do not stay up. They 
walk and do not feel above the housetops nor above 
the headtops of people, but live high enough so as 
to sight with clear glance landscapes of the soul. 
Phillips Brooks used to be, in the art of preaching, 
apart from and apparently remote from the presence 
of those in whose hearing he spoke. His eyes were 
slanted upward as though he saw some face above him, 
so that one discriminating auditor said to the writer 
that Brooks’ words had imparted to them from this 
upward look a weird effect, as if the preacher did but 
revoice words spoken to him by a voice the others could 
not hear. In an ordinary man this idiosyncrasy would 
be worse than a peculiarity; but in this master of souls 
illustrated this mystic aspect of the great preacher’s 
soul. The preacher hears things from above. “I am 
from above,” said Jesus. This Christ from above is 
talking to the preacher below; and the preacher 
reports the converse. When Paul was caught up into 
the heavens the pathos touching us is that he heard 
things “impossible to utter.” The heavenly voices 
219 


THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


I 


can be interpreted only in part. We can vocalize the 
lesser words, but the wondrous words are impossible 
to utter. ’T is for such reasons, doubtless, we have no 
reminiscences from Lazarus. That strange experience 
found no voice. To use the melting words of the Lau¬ 
reate, 

He told it not; or something seal'd 
The lips of that Evangelist." 

Shall there be quarrel between the preacher’s human- 
ness and his remote mystichood.^ Truly, none. He 
is man on the dusty, genial road; he is mystic in the 
dustless, genial sky. He belongs both wheres. He is 
kinsman to the ground and to the sky. Skylarks which 
make the high sky their singing space and drowse it 
with the lotus drug of their lyrics, are birds that nest 
upon the ground. Their song is begotten of the 
meadow of the ground and the meadow of the sky. 

A weirdness clings round about all high words. 
We are touched in all wide thoughts by something 
other than the thought itself. The shapeless beckon- 
ings of the thought intrudes that mystic wonderland 
upon us. It is like fronting a plain and a mountain 
in the night unlit by other than the stars. We are 
as if we looked upon a spirit land which would by 
daylight vanish like a gypsying cloud. To be caught 
in the maze of dreams, to walk, not caring how far 
we fare nor how high, will doubtless bring us at last 
like the circle of the globe back to our own doors, 
but how unspeakably enriched. 

Tennyson’s very noble poem, “The Mystic,” has 
the authentic spell of and spirit of mysticism for 
220 



THE PREACHER—A MYSTIC. 


which this chapter is a plea. Who read that dream¬ 
ful poem will feel the wonder where the mystic walks. 
They maychance may hear the voices, in reply to which 
the mystics talk. The land of dreams is the table¬ 
land where the mystics dwell. “Angels have talked 
with him,” and what is not scheduled, God hath walked 
with him. He has swung into companionships, as if 
he had walked along the highways of night with stars 
for company. Geometry is one thing; journey is an¬ 
other thing. Journeying with God is to loose the eagle 
from a tether into the sky. 

We may not cavil at Jesus’ words because they 
are cryptic. They are undeniably mystic at times and 
all times His words, which seem to walk the pebble 
strand, have intimations of wings. They walk, but 
they could fly as well and have been as natural. We 
are in nothing surprised when Jesus in the open, glo¬ 
rious sky of a spring day, magical with spring breath 
and passion of blossoming, walked calmly from off 
Olivet into the high, blue sky. He was not less one 
of us in that going than He had been in coming 
to nestle in a cattle stall. We felt that of Him all this 
while. He could not be fettered to the ground. He 
had the freedom of the sky. Prometheus was bound; 
Christ was free. He stepped from off the hilltop into 
the eventful heavens. 

The preacher may with all modesty affirm himself 
to be like Christ in that he has the freedom of the 
heavens. John Runyan, prisoner in an ill-smelling jail, 
walked along Delectable Mountains in the dark and 
found there daylight very beautiful, when all his world 
221 


THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


was lost in the dark and wrapped in dreams. So al¬ 
ways, brothers, are we kinsmen of the skies. We wear 
this atmosphere. We tramp along kindling splendors 
of the dawn and feel no burning of our bare feet in 
tramping through their fires. For such goings were 
we meant. “Behold, this dreamer cometh,” was the 
derision of some foolish brothers once long since; but 
Joseph’s dream became purveyor to Egypt and sav¬ 
ior of these witless brethren. The dream is the re- 
vealer of bread and the distributer of bread. 

When the mystic preacher speaks the people feel 
that he has heard a voice and he has seen a face and 
we shall hear a word from the vision and oratory we 
heard not, but seeing he heard, we, too, shall hear, 
alleluiah! And so the mystic is no foreigner to us. 
He is our brother. He is our sure frater, our neces¬ 
sity. We read the poets so, always seeing they are 
open to the dream. They are kinsmen of the things 
we would be kinsmen to but were not, and thus of a 
night they who came from far heard for us and then 
on a day brought to us angel voices. 

*^Angel voices ever singing 
Round the throne, a glorious band.** 

The mystic will ever defy definition, and so much 
the better for that. Definition may be good substance 
for lexicons but is poor substance for life. Life is past 
definition, as are likewise all those words familiarity 
with which leads the soul to enlightenment and con¬ 
trol. We talk of summer, but who defines it? The 
atmosphere of sweat, and the fashioning of things 
222 


THE PREACHER—A MYSTIC. 


that are not into things that are to be, the climb of 
the year toward harvest, the joy of the world in toil 
which feeds the hunger of the world and averts fam¬ 
ine and sings a psalm of plenty—this is summer, and 
who will care to put this into a definition. It is a 
mystery palpable yet impalpable, visible yet invisible, 
too, which must be lived through, loved through, 
laughed through, sweated through, plowed through, 
harvested through to get the blessing and the brawn, 
and there we leave it still a dream, and call the dream¬ 
ing Summer. So the mystic is the indefinable man, 
but the regal man. His voice has timbre; his eyes 
are alight with dawns beyond the dawn of summer 
skies, and he laughs out into the road like an unfa¬ 
tigued runner, from we know not where, running to 
we know not where; but we do know that he “rejoiceth 
like a strong man to run a race.” We feel that of 
him and rejoice. 

After this interval of many days since William 
Blake went from among us, the thing which fascinates 
us is that he was a mystic. He took his way through 
London Town, but was not of London Town. The 
bustle of that metropolis was less to him than the hum 
of dim voices drowsy as the sound of bees; and for 
these dim voices he forever listened. And who sees 
his pictures, which are more authoritative poetry than 
his poems, must know that aU the mechanisms of Lon¬ 
don Town were of less meaning to all time than the 
mystic dreamings of this solitary man. I can not re¬ 
solve my doubt regarding his poetry—not quite, but 
am on the edge of belief that all such as have given 
223 



THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


William Blake’s poetry exceptional emphasis are less 
mastered by the poem than by the poet. He was such 
glorious mystic that they will not deny his most va¬ 
grant fancy. “This mystic must know,” is their ver¬ 
dict. They are snared into being uncritical with the 
writing of one who challenged the skies for a road¬ 
way and found the walking good. 

And for Francis Thompson, with his Elizabethan 
splendor and his uncertain vagabondage of quest, we 
may say something of the same import. We are crea¬ 
tures of the sun, and its drench of light was in our 
eyes. Here was a man who walked unsandaled the 
hot roadway of the sunlight. He is fascinated by the 
sun. He is so passionately mystic we will deny him 
naught. His credential is, he knows the world of 
dream is real, and above every sleeping pillow leaves 
the ladder, climbing into heaven, on which on any night 
those who do wake can see angels walking up and 
down with wings for feet and faces bright and fair. 
No doubt the world is slyly laughing at the mystic, 
and now and then giving a good and wholesome guffaw 
of laughter at him in sheer good humor, but is laugh¬ 
ing at him more as a grown boy laughs at his mother, 
and he is laughing at her for pure love. The mystic 
—^the preacher-mystic—a beatitude upon him, he will 
bring many laughters from the heights of Paradise. 

One such preacher I will describe. His face is 
lucent, his eyes are qualified, gentle, yet soaked wltk 
fire which might at any time leap into tongues of flame 
like eruptive mountains. His hand pressure is gentle. 
He owns a bleeding and a broken heart. Much trouble 
224 


THE PREACHER—A MYSTIC. 


has trampled his winefat till the blood of those grapes 
has issued in manhood. His face has smiles, you could 
not infer his grief by any word or sigh, but were you 
skilled in the unwritten language you would know— 
you would know. His voice is wistful and has sweet¬ 
ness like a man at dream. His voice is music. He 
walks the fitful ways of life unfretted. He brings 
memories of the tempest. The sunlight kindles while 
he fares along his journey. His sayings are big with 
peace. Life feels the comfort of him as it feels the 
comfort of the twilight and the dark. He has had in¬ 
tercourse with God. Angels and he are at rare friend¬ 
ship. His life abides not in sunset but in noon. I 
wonder sometimes as I meet him, as I hear him, whether 
I have met angel or man, and then I know I have 
met both. He is man-angel. He has met the Lord. 
Along the ways, sore-haunted and beset by drift of 
tears like wind-blown rain and walking tired ways, 
where there is neither rest nor sleep, yet he walks with 
God. This mystic, with his torch of poetry alight, 
this mystic with his battle shout, this mystic, illiterate 
in nothing of these earthly ways, but deeply learned 
in the things which hold their intercourse about the 
throne of God—this preacher-mystic—God is with him, 
and he touches the listless lute of human nature to the 
music native to it, but neglected or forgot. Such mys¬ 
tic—such preacher-mystic—a beatitude upon him. 


15 


225 


The Prayer Before the Sermon. 

If called on to say which was the greater conse¬ 
quence, the sermon or the prayer which precedes the 
sermon, a thoughtful minister would find himself in 
a quandary. Both are so gravely important and so 
holily important. The prayer is the preacher’s spe¬ 
cial approach to God, and the sermon his special ap¬ 
proach to man; but his prayer is an approach to God 
for the men and women to whom the sermon is ad¬ 
dressed and with a view to whom with prayers and 
sometimes with anguish he framed his utterance so 
that the two, prayer and sermon, focus on the con¬ 
gregation. The public prayer is not the preacher’s 
prayer of personal devotion, although all the devoutness 
of his life urges its hallowed way through the outrush 
of his prayer, but what is intended is that the prayer 
is not a personal prayer, not the preacher’s own, but 
is a priestly prayer—^the prayer of Moses for the 
congregation or to urge the thought reverently to the 
highest levels possible for devotion to climb,—^to the 
prayer of Jesus at the Suppertime on the last sad 
night He tarried under these stars of ours a Man with 
men. What a hallowed exercise of priestly faculty 
has the preacher in his prayer before the sermon. 

As has been affirmed in these pages, the day of 
the priest has ceased and passed and the day of the 
226 


THE PRAYER BEFORE THE SERMON. 


man has arrived, definitely and not subject to recall; 
but at the prayer in public the man passes into the 
priest, using that term in its Scriptural and not in 
its sacerdotal meaning, the man who forgets himself 
and becomes a voice, a pleading voice for those over 
whom the Chief Shepherd has put him as under shep¬ 
herd. The gravity of the occasion can not be put 
into words. It is an exaltation so high as that in its 
presence all we may do is to bless God, who has ac¬ 
counted us worthy, putting us into this ministry. 

The pastor says devoutly, “Let us pray,” which 
should be no mere form of words, but should, as it does, 
express the direct purpose of the holy hour. He is to 
lead the congregation in prayer. Here his shepherd- 
hood comes into the sunlight of the pasture where the 
sheep are led by the Good Shepherd. To lead in 
prayer! He who is pastor of the flock is to lead this 
flock in thought and heart and contrition out to God, 
the brave Shepherd, the Bishop of their souls. To 
take a congregation out to meet God—that is what 
public prayer at a pastor’s lips and heart is. Who 
shall ascend into this hill of the Lord.'^ Plainly only 
those who have clean hands and a pure heart. Here, 
if ever, a minister is crushed by his load of holy care 
and his own incompetency to do the mighty thing he 
is set to do, crushed to cry, “Sprinkle me with hyssop, 
and I shall be clean; wash me, and I shall be whiter 
than snow.” He must be snow-white who leads a con¬ 
gregation in prayer. There they are; and there he is, 
and—“I, even I must lead them in prayer. I must 
beckon them out to God by going before them; and 
227 



THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


a stranger will they not follow, a stranger to God will 
they not follow,”—this is the pastor’s subconscious col¬ 
loquy with himself. Here is where a preacher’s life 
flowers out into striking phrase and chaste diction and 
sacred eloquence. He is marching to the tune of 
heavenly harps out toward God, with his flock following 
close after him. Clearly, this is august. 

Without argument it will be seen that there is no 
room in this holy exploit for self-thought. A preacher 
at prayer with his congregation must lose all thought 
of himself as an item in the petition he is to raise, save 
as he calls from a sheer sense of weakness in the pres¬ 
ence of the preaching and the pastoring task, a cry 
for help, “Help, O Lord, great help!” But of him¬ 
self, his phrase, his personality, he must leave no hint. 
To obtrude a pastor’s self into a pastor’s prayer is sac¬ 
rilege. “He goeth before them”—He is a voice. 
Whose voice Why, truly, their voice. One of those 
unspeakable touches in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s 
love sonnets, since called “The Sonnets from the Portu¬ 
guese,” is this: 

**And when I sue 

God for myself. He hears that name of thine. 

And sees within my eyes the tears of two.** 

So is the pastor at his public prayer. His words 
are not his words, but theirs; and the tears wetting his 
face are not his, but theirs. He is theirs. His voice 
is to wear a borrowed wonder and a borrowed eloquence. 
Pity the preacher who does not know how to pray in 
public, for therein would he have cast himself off from 
his real priesthood, the intercession for his people, who 
228 


THE PRAYER BEFORE THE SERMON. 


are more truly the people of God than they are the 
people of him. 

He is not praying to the congregation; but his 
prayer is not a voice of private devotion. He has that. 
He loves that. Prayer is his native air who walks with 
God; but now, privacy is passed; publicity, holy pub¬ 
licity, is come. He is a public functionary, God’s and 
man’s. “Let us pray”—and then the push outward 
toward God, the leadership of men and women and 
children toward the God and Father of us all. Great 
hour, and very holy! 

The prayer should not be too lengthy. What tires, 
diverts. The sense of the passing of time should not 
intrude on this quest, called prayer; and if a preacher 
goes on and on and still on, the people will grow tired. 
It is useless to say they ought not to grow tired; for 
they will. A preacher ought not to be prolix when he is 
pastoring souls out toward the great Good Shepherd. 
I recall, when reading Joseph Parker’s prayers, as well 
as when I heard him pray in his own church, that he 
was not long; nay, he was really brief. His prayer 
was like a lift of wave which billows “too deep for sound 
and foam,” but brought us, whom he led in prayer, 
to that shore where stood the Christ as in the gray of 
that unforgotten dawn of Galilee in that dear long 
ago, when John of the youth’s eyes and the seeing 
heart sang out like a hymn, “It is the Lord.” What 
more has any prayer need of? That is its supreme 
purpose, and when achieved, the prayer may justly con¬ 
clude. I once heard Wayland Hoyt pray, and it was 
so brief that he had scarce begun ere he concluded, yet 
229 


THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


was the hush of God on all our hearts; and our souls 
responded, “Amen.” Nor can we forget how the world- 
prayer taught humanity by the Christ is so brief the 
little children can say it ere they fall asleep, however 
tired they may be. And the high-priestly prayer of¬ 
fered that night black as ink, but that night which 
was close against the dawn which verged not since to¬ 
ward any evening—that prayer was scarce longer than 
the prayer a novice prays when his lips first frame 
themselves to audible orison. 

The end of prayer is not the naming of all objects 
on the landscape of life, though many seem to think it 
is. Their public prayers are an inventory of objects. 
They think they may slight some cause as omission 
might slight some Church society. They do scant cour¬ 
tesy to God in such views of his grace and willingness 
to help. Prayer is not more the art of including than 
the art of omission. To leave out many things and 
name some things which shall be meet supplication for 
that hour—^that is the wise preacher’s prayer. He will 
reduce the topics of his supplication so the hearers 
whose ears are greeted by his prayer in their behalf 
may not be impressed, “Can there be anything the 
preacher has not mentioned.^” To cease to pray, then, 
is quite as important as to begin to pray. He must 
have in his own soul the lift of spirit, else he can not 
lead them in prayer. 

To commit prayers to writing, and then to memory, 
seems to this writer so grim a travesty on prayer as 
not to be thinkable, except that sometimes he has heard 
such advice given. It contravenes all the fine thought 
230 


THE PRAYER BEFORE THE SERMON. 


of prayer. Can not a man at home with God and man, 
who has been in and out amongst these folks of his 
all the week through, feel what he ought to petition 
for without set preparation therefor Pity him if he 
can not. Here, if anywhere in all the latitudes where 
the preacher moves, ought his spirit to take wings as 
a bird does, not because the taking wing was planned, 
but because the bird then had mood to fly. Some cen¬ 
tral matter will fall like a gentle, yet firm, hand upon 
the shoulder of the preacher’s heart as he kneels to 
pray, which shall, as his heart and lips shape the phras¬ 
ing, be a voice of God to those who bow beneath the 
music of his thought and voice. He has led them in 
prayer. He has seen enough of their lives to know 
without the telling, how to lead them to the heart of 
God. God does not need informing about the affairs 
of this earth, possibly, as many preachers think. He 
is posted. And this they may assume, and may as¬ 
sume besides that God will not omit care for the inter¬ 
ests which the preacher omits to pray for. Some deep 
need which has impressed itself on the preacher’s self 
will, when pressed into the molds of prayer, come out 
as help to very many. 

And this opening prayer may not be reduplicated 
day by day. If extemporaneous prayer be indulged 
in, as “is meet, right, and our bounden duty,” seeing 
a son should be able and glad to lay his heart open 
to his “Father which art in heaven;” then should there 
be diversity of utterance, seeing earth and life have a 
diversity of needs. So many hands will push the life 
outward in prayer if the preacher has care to heed 
231 


THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


their gentle pressure, and if he feels that he is God’s 
man, who should be awake to the faint suggestions of 
the providence of God and of the tempering of His 
winds to His shorn lambs. To leave his soul open to 
the suggestion of God is the very surest preparation 
for leadership in prayer. 

There must be in the prayer-offerer for a congre¬ 
gation a swiftness of wing toward the throne of God, 
an unperfunctory and unconventional approach, which 
shall take at a touch the world and its dull dust far 
from their souls and give them leave to crowd up close 
to Christ. So shall prayer-leader and prayer-led be 
strangely comforted of God. 

And how are we to lead in prayer. Great Prayer- 
Hearer and Prayer-Answerer.? How can we ascend this 
very high hill of the Lord.? He that hath cleah hands 
and a pure heart, may dare the ascent.? But Lord, 
Thou seest us and knowest that angels clean and strong 
are not pure in Thy sight; how much less men, how 
very much less.? 

Lord, encourage us and fit us for this lordly task 
of leading a congregation in prayer. Thy congregation 
in prayer. May we by Thy grace be enabled to lead 
them right, we ask in our Savior Christ. Amen. 


232 


The Justification of a Sermon. 


A MAN has no right to ask the attendance and at¬ 
tention of a people unless he has something to say. 
Therein lies his solitary justification for asking a hear¬ 
ing. He has a thought which, in his judgment as a 
minister of God, should be uttered. This considera¬ 
tion will always give dignity to a discourse. 

If a preacher thinks a congregation should listen 
to him because he is a preacher, he may readily pass 
into vaporing. Michael Drayton in “Nymphidia” 
speaks of those who talk: 

“Some of this thing and some of that, 

And many of they know not what 
But that they must be saying."* 

If a preacher should belong to this company, then may 
he be without a congregation; but a manly man must 
not and will not assume he has a right to an audience, 
and be out of tune and in bad temper if he does not 
have it. He must as a man stand on his own feet. He 
must not ask to be propped up even by his Master, 
Jesus Christ. God may be relied on as a help, but 
not as a lazy man’s help, nor an empty man’s source 
of supply. While it is true people should come to 
church to worship God, yet this lacks bearing on the 
preacher’s case, because if that be his argument it will 
233 




THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


slay him, seeing they can worship God when the 
preacher is not present. The house of prayer is avail¬ 
able by week days. Its silence is sublime at every hour, 
so that, while it is very true a congregation should 
gather to worship God, it is likewise definitely true 
that, while the service of worship is knit into the serv¬ 
ice of preaching, then the preacher is incompetent who 
hides his flabby utterance behind a screen of worship. 
If the preacher is a necessity instead of a loquacity, 
then his place in the divine services is very noble and 
full of subtle inspiration. 

The preacher has to think with souls. This is quite 
different from thinking for souls. Protestantism has 
dethroned that false god. The Protestant gospel is 
not put up in capsules, to be taken without thought, 
but is a book with open pages asking to be read and 
pondered. Men can not weigh nothing. A preacher 
is asked to give the minds of his hearers something to 
weigh. “Ponder” is a good word for the auditor’s side. 
He must have something touched with ponderability, 
else he can not ponder. We weigh no vacuums. A 
preacher’s prefatory mood for a discourse must not be, 
“Well, I must speak twice on Sunday,” but, “I must 
speak something twice on Sunday.” This view of his 
own preaching attempt will stand him very solidly on 
his own feet. It will give him a trituration to dispense. 
He will perceive that what is wanted is not to be vol¬ 
uble, but valuable; a member of this preacher’s Church 
will bestir himself physically and mentally to attend 
Sunday service by, “I shall miss something if I am not 
present.” Blessed is that preacher of whom his people 
234 


THE JUSTIFICATION OF A SERMON. 


say, “He always says something.” One manly thought 
will make a valuable contribution to any listener and 
will redeem any sermon from insipidity. One thought 
brawnily handled will make a great hour for preacher 
and congregation. 

To pivot sermons on a pretty illustration is shame¬ 
ful. A sermon is not for an illustration: an illustra¬ 
tion is for a sermon. Illustrative material has misled 
very many men. A pennant is a pretty device: but it 
does not shelter a family from a storm. A tent does 
that. Homiletic finery is no main matter. To say 
things daintily, gracefully, forcefully is worthy, but 
when substituted for things to say becomes melodrama. 
The central business which any sermonizer has in hand 
is, therefore, not the clothing an idea, but the having 
an idea to clothe. Vesture is a mild incident: a body 
for the vesture is a principal matter. liess study on 
how to say and more study on what to say will rescue 
a preacher from the cheapness and meanness of intel¬ 
lectual millinery. It is shameful for a preacher, man 
of iron and granite he ought to be, to be a milliner 
dealing in laces and ribbons. 

Coming before a congregation, a preacher may hon¬ 
orably say, without a symptom of boasting, “My breth¬ 
ren, I have something to say which appears to me 
worthy of your thought.” Then he will not be a pen¬ 
sioner on the bounty of their attention, but they pen¬ 
sioners on his bounty of truth perceived and truth de¬ 
clared. 

The search for sermonic themes, then, will be the 
masculine search for things that ought to be said. 
235 


THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


Things which do not clearly clamor to be said may 
safely be omitted. This rule does not mean that a 
minister should only talk on so supposed “great topics.’^ 
God is not so conclusive on great topics as some men 
seem to be. Whatever needs to be said is in so far a 
great topic. Nothing is trivial which pertains to soul 
or body or behavior. There are majors and minors, 
but just where God would make the demarcation is not 
totally apparent. Worship may be a larger issue than 
the collection, but Paul does not perceive any incon¬ 
gruity of thought in proceeding with a calm voice to 
say, “Take the collection!” Good manners are as right 
an exhibit of the gospel thought as to discuss prayer 
or forgiveness. Such as always discuss only the over¬ 
tones of the gospel will prove defective preachers, be¬ 
cause the undertones of the gospel are so insistent with 
all manhood and pertinency to life. Hospitality is a 
good thought, though not so great a thought as the 
incarnation. However, the world pathos of the birth 
of Christ was the inhospitality of the earth—“there 
was no room for them at the inn.” The strong man 
and tearless may be pardoned if he sob aloud when 
he reads that passing incident not dwelt on, barely 
mentioned, by the evangelist. But we earth folks can 
never get over the shame of that hostel which left the 
Lord of Glory to be born among the soft-breathed 
cattle. 

“He came unto His own, and His own received 
Him not.” Read that, who can, without heart-anguish, 
and we will not covet his heart. Discourtesy, inhospi¬ 
tality merge their indigence with the advent of God. 
236 


THE JUSTIFICATION OF A SERMON. 


Truly the lesser considerations are only a step before 
they cross the threshold of considerations the most ma- 
jestical which have blest this world by dwelling in it. 

Not a greatest thought is required for a sermon, 
but a thought; and in a very true sense any thought 
is great, particularly if it have in it immediacy of hold 
upon life. When a thought is found for a sermon, 
then the whole intellectual process is redeemed from 
mere daintiness. Daintiness would slur a sermon just 
as a pink ribbon would make a cannon appear ridicu¬ 
lous. A cannon which has in its hands the destiny of 
fleets is not to be tethered by a ribbon. Branches of 
a tree are, in place, necessary; but branches minus a 
trunk neither bear fruit nor retain verdure. Branches 
go with a trunk. “I am the Vine, ye are the branches;” 
branches must forever affirm that the trunk is the cen¬ 
tral majesty and meaning. 

The philosophy of a text as a preacher’s watchword 
is here apparent. The text, if chosen with any sort 
of sense whatever, will have some thought. That is 
why, as a rule, textual preaching is brainier preach¬ 
ing than theme preaching, in which a text is chosen 
after the essay is written and serves as a mild motto for 
the theme. Bible texts have much masculinity. To 
preach on “Apple Blossoms” would be to detract from 
that delicious piece of scent and tint. The lessons to 
be drawn would have to be strangely robust to survive 
such a theme. So “Autumn Leaves,” beautiful as they 
are, and full of all the pathos of the dying year, 
scarcely commend themselves as a trunk for a sermon. 
Many things are graciously illustrative which become 

237 


THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 

ungracious when they are given the chief seat in the 
synagogue of service or of thought. If the preacher- 
body take this text, “As his custom was,” he is at 
once possessed of a thought of great strength and 
beauty, as well as of singular spiritual suggestion. 
Jesus had a habit of going to church—is the thought 
supplied, and how worthy to be dwelt on and amplified 
and enforced with tears! Or, “Neither did Asher drive 
out the inhabitants of Accho,” which, while on the face 
bearing no stimulating suggestion, when viewed closely 
becomes instinct with the thought of the lost chance. 
Accho was on the Great Sea, and God had given it to 
the tribe of Asher to be conquered for the children of 
Israel; and they took it not! Therefore had Israel no 
seaboard nor seashore nor seaport nor any wharf for 
ships. They cut themselves off from the world by 
their inertia or cowardice, call it what you will. That 
text will break strong hearts when its sore point is 
held frankly at the breast. Or, “God hath shined in 
our hearts,” light put into the heart of life so that 
we may have daylight on our lives and step no more 
in any darkness. Think on that, to be bettered by it. 
Or, “Moses wist not that his face shone.” How holy 
a thought, this, that goodness is unconscious, and that 
the best people are not pondering on their own piety, 
and that humility is a necessity of Christianity! 
“Without are dogs.” O, the woe of being forever with¬ 
out! The companionships of hell bid us fiee from its 
vicinity—much more from its inhabitancy. Or, “Lot 
pitched his tent over against Sodom,” and this Lot 
was barely rescued from destruction of body by the 
238 


THE JUSTIFICATION OF A SERMON. 


urgency of angels from the place where he ought never 
to have been; but he pitched his tent toward it. The 
pitching of the tent toward Sodom is the advent of 
disaster to such as so pitch the tent; and Sodom is 
near village to everybody’s life. Beware of pitching 
toward Sodom. Only one thought in a sermon, and 
that sermon will be like a sword whose raging thrusts 
few men can parry. 

This, then, is intended as a sermon necessity, that 
something shall be proffered the brain and the heart 
of the congregation which shall have validity in the 
argument of life. Others may indulge in simple 
tracery upon the window-pane; but a preacher may not. 
He is not an etcher even with the frost. He is sum- 
moner of souls, and while he summons souls may make 
dim and dreamy tracery upon the window-pane; but 
it must be subordinate. Preaching is not tracery. 
Preaching is not “witchery, witchery, witchery,” like 
the voice of the Maryland yellow-throat. Preaching is 
providing souls with household necessities, farming ne¬ 
cessities, sea-faring necessities, with staff and hoe, and 
sail and anchor. He may have a growth of morning 
glory vines about his door; but he must make a door, 
at which life may find the entrance to vast issues. The 
preacher must never conceive himself to be an aesthetic 
decorator like William Morris. He must conceive him¬ 
self to be a builder like the men who have housed the 
unsheltered world. We plant ivy beside the wall; but 
we build the wall, and then bewilder it with ivy growth. 
The preacher must not be spumacious. Foam is beau¬ 
tiful ; but the wave, and not the foam, upbears the ship. 
239 


THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


“I have a truth,” the preacher says to God. “Give 
me Thy grace to make it heartening and apparent and 
pregnant.” This truth is the preacher’s guardian of 
self-respect, his assurance to himself that he is not a 
maker of theological embroidery, but a maker of char¬ 
acter weapons and character instruments of husbandry 
for the fields of virtue. 

‘‘To-day one thought for man and God,” will make 
each Sabbath’s advent a day full of self-respect and 
self-restraint and sound of heavenly voices saying, 
“Save the world.” 

Thee we worship, strong Son of God, and Thy work 
we would reverently and gladly do. Howbeit such a 
task is greater than all our summoned powers. We 
mass them as a phalanx, and then they seem too feeble. 
What shall we do, our God, that we fumble not this 
task of Thine 

Stay close beside our comings and our goings. 
Thou, who knowest all things, knowest that we love 
Thee and, as we go about in Thy footsteps, want above 
all beside, to lead the folk to God. Our sermons bleed 
Thy way into that, our sermons love Thy way into 
that, our sermons weep Thy way into that; so shall the 
sermon never be ours and ever be Thine, and accom¬ 
plish that whereunto Thou didst send it, we ask in Thy 
Holy Name. Amen. 


240 


The Preacher As an Appreciator. 

Depreciation is a shallow man’s gift. Apprecia¬ 
tion is a strong man’s gift. The preacher is a strong 
man. That is, he is to build for that and toward that, 
and for strength God, who called him, meant him. 

Happy that minister who keeps all the windows 
and doors of his soul wide open. To shut things out 
is never the policy of the gospel. Jesus in His prayer 
for such as did love Him and should love Him while 
time endured, prayed ‘‘not that Thou wouldst take 
them out of the world, but that Thou wouldst keep 
them from the evil.” What a courageous prayer that 
was! Nor was it less wise than brave. To move among 
baleful influences and not be snared by their contagion, 
is the wisdom of the Christ. We are not dodgers of 
things, but battlers with things. And the attitude of 
ministerial culture and refinement is not that of shut¬ 
ting out, but of opening toward. As the morning glory 
opens to the light, so the better sort are to open to 
all better things. “Whatsoever things are pure, honest, 
of good report”—read that catalogue, and mark what 
relation the Christian is to have toward them. And 
what is it but appreciation “Think on these things.” 
Be appreciative of these things. 

So valuable a portion of life’s commodities is to 
be had by this openness toward all good things. The 
16 241 


THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


watching to see what shall come along this path. The 
service Ralph Waldo Emerson can render anybody will 
be that he goes along the road with what Landor, in 
speaking of Robert Browning, has phrased the “in¬ 
quiring eye.” What a captivating and adequate phrase 
that is! “The inquiring eye” is the eye which hastes 
to see. Nothing escapes it. The appreciative eye, in 
other words, will glass, as on a lake, the vision of the 
sky and land. Nothing is hidden from its quest. 

The appreciation of brother ministers is a good 
place to plant a flag under which to stand. To re¬ 
joice in the success of others, not to moan over it. Of 
all the follies which wise men commit no one is more 
folly mad than that view which supposes that by how 
much some brother minister is praised by that much 
one’s self is dispraised, or that by how much a brother 
minister is held in slight esteem by so much the greater 
esteem will come to one’s self. The facts of experi¬ 
ence give the lie to all such meanness as this. What 
we do see is that in proportion as a brother minister is 
popular in that same proportion is it easier for every 
other preacher to become popular. Popularity gets 
in the air. One house of worship meagerly attended is 
no guarantee that the next church neighbor will preach 
to a crowded house. All pastors of years’ standing 
will know this well; but for young preachers this word 
may serve an honest purpose and may bring needed 
help. Wise ministers know that no preacher can build 
on the failure of another preacher. That is not how 
things run in the business called preaching. There are 
plenty of people in any place, ordinarily, to fill all the 
242 


THE PREACHER AS APPRECIATOR. 


churches. Preaching is not a competitive industry. 
Let that be said in a loud voice, as we preachers say. 
That is just what preaching is not. The crowded 
church with one pastor does not need to diminish the 
crowd of any other minister. After watching the case 
through years, my belief is that the easiest place to get 
a hearing is a city where every preacher is popular 
and every church is crowded. One man gathers one 
type, and another man another type. Every lawyer 
tends to get clients; every preacher tends to get clients, 
only those clients are not gotten at the expense of any 
other brother, but are brought from those who would 
not, were he not there, go to church at all. This 
contingent of a preacher’s hearing, of course, excludes 
his own members. Those he may be supposed to have 
about him. But the city-full or the country-full of peo¬ 
ple who attend no service are the commons where each 
minister has equal right, and where there are more than 
can be entertained in any one or in many churches. 

In the name of God and the name of men who de¬ 
spise to see a preacher little, let every novice in the 
ministry set himself irrevocably to the right view of 
his brothers in the craft. Not depreciation, but ap¬ 
preciation, is the working word for manly men. In 
a certain city there are two men who are natively rivals, 
as cheap men would reckon. They are both popular. 
They both preach to large and enthusiastic congrega¬ 
tions. They are both lovable men and greatly loved; 
multitudes speak the appreciative word of each; and 
these men are large enough to enjoy the good fame 
of each other, and when they meet, their love is so 
243 


THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 

transparent and apparent that to see it warms the heart 
of such as behold it. I have been the guest of the 
one when—whom should I meet at his table but this 
other popular brother! They were brothers. And I 
will venture that nothing these men said, as nothing 
these men did, was quite so capable as this bigness of 
nature, which taught the big heart wherever it was 
seen. There is room for all. I have always grieved 
in thought that two such preachers as Phillips Brooks 
and Henry Ward Beecher were not well acquainted. 
They were the two greatest preachers of the world in 
their day. Not that they envied each other, but they 
did not know each other as they ought. Life is 
crowded, and easily, unless men are specially on their 
guard, will they lose the solace and delight of friend¬ 
ship. It is good to go apart and rest a little now and 
then with some elect soul in your own vocation. When 
Longfellow and Lowell and Parsons and Norton and 
Holmes met in their club it was good for them and 
good for us. I love to think of these strong souls 
breaking bread together and smiting wit with wit and 
stirring thought with thought. In the life of Grover 
Cleveland not many things commend him so to myself 
as the friendship between him and Joseph Jefferson. 
Man with man, that was all; and the recently trans¬ 
lated poet, Richard Watson Gilder, and that sup¬ 
posedly unresponsive man, Grover Cleveland, met and 
enjoyed one another. This world is big enough for 
friendship and should be given to that in part. When 
a man passes through the threshold of the life to be, 
then we, who might have known him more and did not, 
244 


THE PREACHER AS APPRECIATOR. 


feel a keen and abiding regret. We can not recall that 
neglect. Friendship for strong souls is an equipment 
for the strong soul. Tennyson and Browning at friend¬ 
ship, each with a volume of poems dedicated to each, 
make these beautiful masters of poetry seem manlier 
and dearer now that both are 

** Passed 

To where beyond these voices there is peace.** 

A roomy heart is a great adjunct to preacherhood. 
Indeed, we may safely say that without that a preacher 
can never be a leader of the best souls. Envy, wher¬ 
ever else it may have a home, must not come and find 
a preacher’s soul a house swept and garnished, and so 
come in with its seven devils and take up residence. 
The lean devil of envy, let him move on, and move on 
in a hurry. • 

To love one’s brethren is to make him not finical, 
nor critical, but appreciative. To rejoice in another’s 
success is both worthy a preacher’s manliness and is 
a good schooling for his heart. No man is so ample 
in his brain-life as not to be broadened and helped 
by contact with and friendship with such as differ from 
him by a whole sky in their intellectual methods and 
delights, and the appreciations which grow natively 
from the soil of the soul. To enjoy another man’s 
preaching, what a delight that is, and what a sweet 
gift that is! I know a man who has genius for appre¬ 
ciation. He loves brethren, and brethren love him: 
he loves to hear them preach; he sees their strengths 
and passes lightly over their weaknesses, or ignores them. 
245 



THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


But he has the sagacity to see not the point of his 
friend’s weakness, but some point of strength. Can 
a man honestly appreciate totally different kinds of 
preaching? Certainly, just as he can appreciate to¬ 
tally different landscapes. Why need the prairie quar¬ 
rel with the mountain, or the mountain with the sea? 
The great man is he who can with glee fold all this 
world holds in his arms and give God thanks therefor. 
So with preaching. The poetical mentality can enjoy 
the hard reasoning of such as go by steps and not 
by flights. The bare rock on which this solid world 
is built is in its stately strength as beautiful as the 
climb of mountain crowded with the pines, or the sea 
cliff smoldering under the fire of the heather. To 
catch the strength of every man we know, is real ge¬ 
nius. And it is a genius to which all may attain. The 
genius for appreciation of others may be mastered as 
we would master algebra, if we take not to it as an in¬ 
clination. We may not excuse ourselves from this ac¬ 
complishment. Poets are born; but appreciation, near 
kin to poetry, may be acquired. And blessed are all 
such as do acquire it. Another brother’s characteris¬ 
tics of mind or body we may learn to like and learn 
to love. To begin here is a good thing for every 
preacher. 

Every young evangelist should hunt for the good 
points in other men in his occupation. Instead of stu¬ 
dents learning to pick flaws in the discourses of other 
men—their inferiors or superiors, it matters not—it 
would be wiser for them and their teachers to school 
these mentalities to find the perfume and the beauty 
246 


THE PREACHER AS APPRECIATOR. 


and the strength of other men’s words. The critical 
faculty is a much ill-treated faculty, being handled by 
such gross incompetents. All colleges should teach ap¬ 
preciations of literatures and philosophies, whereas 
much of the work, unworthily enough, is a dissecting 
the best things this world has said by its best brains. 
There be those who find many flaws in Shakespeare, 
but are laggards in finding those splendors which shame 
the luster of suns. I would rather find one thought 
which would fill me with dreams more glad than any 
dawn, than to discover a hundred frailties and disso¬ 
nances. One of Shakespeare’s phrases makes my soul 
rock like the bewildered sea. I love him to do so with 
me. I am more engaged in one such utterance than in 
the trivial question, “Who is the third murderer in 
Macbeth?” One is curious and uneventful; the other is 
radiant and thrilling. Anybody can hunt the flaw; 
and the less competent one is, the more readily can he 
find the flaw. Whereas, to find the certain music, the 
blended light and dark which make the gloaming, to 
sight the “dim violet” of phrase, and smell the per¬ 
fume of forgotten flowers, is not that the better part? 

The man who appreciates widely will be an inter¬ 
esting man. He will not be conceited; and possibly the 
world can do without conceit. So many can supply 
that cheap commodity. To rejoice in what has been 
said better than we can say it, in things seen when we 
would have been blind to the sight, in what has been 
sung with sweetness like the song of the nightingale,— 
these make us very rich. We shall be saved from what 
I venture to call intellectual primness. We shall be 
247 



THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


let out into the wide, fair land, where all things won¬ 
derful are daily occurrences. What a strange gift 
appreciation is, and how it bears the soul aloft on 
wings! And when we turn our thoughts to preachers, 
like ourselves, then to know where they are our masters, 
and not be sullen thereat, but very, very glad, will be 
to touch our hearts with some of our larger self. 

In a few past years the Methodist Episcopal 
Church has lost to its visible ranks and has contributed 
to the Church of the Firstborn, which is on high, cer¬ 
tain members from its Episcopal Board, who may il¬ 
lustrate what a wealth untold we have in the varied per¬ 
sonalities, as well as personages, whom we meet and 
rarely know the value of until the day is far spent and 
the night is at hand, and what is sadder, when the day 
is all spent and the night has shut down. 

Bishop Merrill died. He was a calm man. Self- 
contained, pointed in speech, accurate in thought, clear 
in utterance as if a clear sky had been a voice; not easy 
to come close to, an administrator of singular ability, 
who makes one think of John Marshall, so clear and 
forensic a brain he had. “Judicial” seems about the 
wisest word to use regarding him. And when he 
passed out of our sight we saw what a wealth the 
Church had in having him. That he was unlike others 
was a distinguished part of his value to us and for 
us. There he stands at the end of the avenue, a mas¬ 
ter of gatherings in that he never is perturbed, and 
that men of aU sorts of capacity recognize in him the 
capacity for captaincy. He stands calm as a statue, 
yet vital as spring. 


248 


THE PREACHER AS APPRECIATOR. 


Then Bishop Joyce preached himself out into the 
eternal life. At preaching did he receive the stroke of 
death. How could there have been a finer appropri¬ 
ateness in the passing of an evangelist such as he? 
His feelings always spoke. He was creature of occa¬ 
sions in large way as orators have been wont to be. 
He sagged or lifted with his audience, even as it sagged 
or lifted with him betimes. But he went around this 
planet preaching in tongues known and unknown, him¬ 
self his own orator and interpreter, or some other voice 
his interpreter, and in all places whither he came peo¬ 
ple were melted under the gospel which he preached 
and were brought to the Christ he loved. What a 
gift! and how he reveled in this delight of seeing 
his sons and daughters in the gospel multiply I 
Why quarrel with a gift like that? He was a voice 
for which the Church could, with devout heart, render 
thanks. 

And then Bishop Andrews was of us, and went out 
from us into the heavenly land. And he was himself. 
His manners were a trifle ornate, his type inclined to 
the feminine. He was a gentleman of the old school. 
His powers appeared to grow with every day of life. 
Odds the richest of his vintage was tramped out when 
he was near fourscore. His was a phenomenal men¬ 
tality in that regard. His mind was alert; he was 
awake to his era; he was unafraid of any new thing; 
he was what was named progressive in theology, but 
with such a clear, keen hold of the everlasting essen¬ 
tials as to make them blaze like clustered suns. His 
address on “The Bible,” delivered not long before his 
249 


THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


death to a body of theological graduates, must wait 
long to find its equal, not to say its superior; and the 
Episcopal Address he wrote smites like a sword and 
warms like a flame. He was dainty and exact in the 
use of ideas and words, and a serene, courageous, cap¬ 
tivating soul, the possession of whom by a Church was 
riches. 

And there was Bishop Fitzgerald, a brain of states¬ 
man sort, an intelligence of rare sagacity. He played 
chess as few men could, which argued the mind of the 
soldier and the statesman. Behind his white beard he 
hid himself as behind a fortress. You could not know 
what that man who was behind there was cogitating. 
He knew law and was a president of great assemblies, 
who could not be stampeded nor dismayed. He held 
to what he thought was the central truth of the gospel 
with a fidelity and austerity which minded a man of 
the Puritans. His was a heart of warmth and manli¬ 
ness, and a mind which grasped and held with an iron 
hold; and on a journey about the world looking the 
gospel in the eyes and seeing its conquest he died, and 
swept in quiet majesty from a foreign missionary 
strand into the land of God. 

And afterward was Bishop McCabe. He was a 
whirlwind! He blew, and the world fell before his 
sweep. He was unparalleled. It mattered not what 
he said, the country wept and sung and laughed. He 
was in everything torrential. He found the pocketbook 
of Methodism. He was laughed at as a visionary. He 
knew that dreams about the kingdom of the Christ were 
staple of triumph, and dealt largely in the staple. He 
250 


THE PREACHER AS APPRECIATOR. 


sung; and the hard-hearted were not their own, but 
were bowed down like a strong man weeping over the 
body of his dead child. The voice of him had its in¬ 
describable pathos. Whatever he said or sang had its 
weird and irrevocable witchery. He is indescribable, 
unduplicatable. A heart so big it held the world with 
little effort, and a swing of triumph in his soul which, 
whether it spake for country or for God, made what 
he dreamed pass with leaps like a wild steed leaps, into 
fulfillment. We had him, and in having him counted 
ourselves richer than Croesus. And we were. 

And then Bishop Fowler. Who shall utter the 
word robust enough to characterize that man of iron 
will and sweep of thought and movement far-going like 
a comet’s sweep? It was worth years of life to see him 
plume him like another eagle for far intellectual flight. 
In no haste, without rest he swung out on his far orbit. 
He held in solution mighty moods and mighty thoughts, 
and was to appearances a gigantic brain only, and in 
actuality, to such as knew him, one of the warmest, 
truest hearts that ever beat. To him God was very 
real and very great, and the gospel mighty in power 
to forgive sins and redeem sinners. His power of apt, 
unforgettable statement has seldom been equaled, and 
it is to be doubted whether it has ever been surpassed. 
He overbore you with his weight. He pushed you down 
as a mountain might be pushed over by the shoulder of 
an angel. He was a mighty asset to every mighty cause 
which the world’s need called into operation, and when 
he spoke for Missions he had a world-sweep which left 
no choice to brains but to believe and to proceed. 

251 


THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


And now in recent days we have had Bishop Good- 
sell, of whom this writer telegraphed to the Central 
Christian Advocate: 

“A distinguished and versatile intelligence: an un¬ 
usual conversationalist, a choice humor, a writer of rare 
English, a clear brain, a lover of the outdoors, a fast 
lover of Methodism, a man of deep and fine feeling, 
a wearer of the world in his heart having visited the 
whole planet in the interests of the Church, a religious 
nature of depth and sanity, an ‘espiscopos’ in every 
honorable sense of that word,”—a characterization 
which, while brief, is just and, as words run, adequate. 
His head was massive, a Webster cranium, I used to 
sit off and admire as I would a noble bronze. He was 
a tower. You felt he could not be jostled. His pres¬ 
ence was commanding. His strength was strong at all 
times, stronger ^at some times, strongest at rare times, 
and he could climb high Alps when the occasion called 
his name. His final oration, for so it is now seen to 
be, namely, his Episcopal Address presented to the 
General Conference of 1908, was a princely word said 
by a princely mentality. How great it was as it re¬ 
sounded in the soul as we heard it from his lips, now 
dumb in death! 

Now the inculcation is clear that these men, each in 
his place and all together, were worthier riches than 
any one of them or any one type of them could have 
been. We do not need to choose between them. We 
have full liberty to have them all. “Whether Paul or 
Apollos or Cephas, all are yours,” is a very wide say¬ 
ing worthy of all heed. 


252 


THE PREACHER AS APPRECIATOR. 


To appreciate a diversity of talent is pretty cer¬ 
tain to lead to a splendid life of our own; whereas, to 
say with a critic mood, “I do n’t care for this style; 
my kind of oratory is thus and thus,” is a special and 
grievous style of egotism, which we do well to throttle 
lest it throttle us. To appreciate the strong man’s 
strength at the point of his strength, is so wise and 
so fair and so brotherly withal, and will lead to our¬ 
selves being more the men these larger men have been. 
Thank God for every form capacity has shaped itself 
into for the bettering this world and the helping all 
of us to the development of the best in us, so that what 
we do may find favor “in the sight of Him with whom 
we have to do.” Study to appreciate thy brethren. 
Why might this not be a commandment each man may 
pronounce to his own soul? Life will be sweeter, loves 
from our brethren will accumulate upon us, cynicism 
will find no standing-room in our spirits, and we shall 
be gratified to find how very much sanity, fervor, vigor, 
beauty, and help we shall receive from every source; 
and our brethren in the ministry, whenever they preach 
in our hearing, shall become real evangels to our hearts. 
An admiration for the talents of others shall be not an 
affectation with us, but a possession and a passion. 
Our brother’s success shall be our own. We shall feel 
through all that these broad lines on which w^e are build¬ 
ing our ministerial manhood, qualify us to look man 
and minister in the face and greet him, “Brother be¬ 
loved.” 

Lord, help us that, whatever preacher we hear, we 
may hear Thee through him. “Out of the mouths of 
253 



THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


babes and sucklings Thou hast ordained praise.” We 
gladly recall that saying of Thine. 

And in ourselves and for our brother preachers we 
rejoice that Thou canst speak far above the preacher. 
Thou art his Lord: he tries to say Thy say. O Holy 
Ghost, speak Thou through all Thy ministers to my 
heart and keep me far removed from the captious spirit. 
May I hear for eternity. Amen. 


254 


The Preacher—A Man of Prayer. 

The preacher is in a special manner God’s man. 
He is not his own. He is truly “bought with a price.” 
He is a sinner saved by the blood of the Redeemer, 
and he is called of God as was Aaron. He is as the 
tribe of Levi, which had its sacrament of loss in ad¬ 
dition to its sacrament of grace. “Thou shalt not 
number the Tribe of Levi,” but he shall be for a 
guard to Israel—not counted, but counted on. The 
preacher is apart from, as a part of, man. He must 
not for a moment forget what he is apart from, nor 
what he is a part of. He must know his place, and 
he must take his place. 

He has a calling with God. It is the highest 
amongst men. He must stand like an anvil. He must 
be a rock. He must be a voice. He must be a touch. 
He must be like Christ all the day long and all the 
night through. He is not an intermittent man: he is 
a perpetual man. The processes of the years must not 
be more persistent nor consistent than he. Always go¬ 
ing about doing good, always wanting to be a helper 
of mankind, always wanting to know things from God 
to tell things to man,—that is the pastor-preacher. 

Now, to state his task is to prophesy his need. He 
has a vocation too big for him. Hercules is pictured 
as leaning, stooped, holding up the world. The crush 
255 



THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


of the preacher’s load would break him to the earth 
except he have a “Very Present Help.” To see how 
mountain pines are broken by the weight of winter 
snowfall on their tops is very pitiful. In coming 
among the rugged mountains and climbing The Di¬ 
vide, where rivers are turned toward the Atlantic or 
Pacific, I have seen there many demolished majesties 
broken, with their green tops like a banner shot from 
its staflp and its trunk standing like a staff from which 
no banner shall float evermore; or I have seen the green 
top dangling like the helpless arm of a mutilated sol¬ 
dier struck with saber in battle-charge so that it will 
never lift a sword or hold a flag again. So these piti¬ 
ful tops hung. And some great trees lay face down¬ 
ward in the dirt like a slain soldier without the courtesy 
of burial. 

These are pictures of what the preacher would be 
were he the sole wearer of his enormous load. No man 
could wear people in his heart and love but for the 
power unspeakable which upbears the weak and makes 
them equal to their tasks. “My grace shall be suffi¬ 
cient for thee,” was the word of heartening which put 
Paul the Apostle in a mind of resolution to abide and 
“faint not,” though the “thorn in the flesh” thrusts 
him through day and night like a dart. God is with 
the man of the immense load if he wants God; and the 
preacher wants God more than the earth wants day¬ 
light. 

Whatever be the philosophy of prayer, this thing 
is conclusively shown by reading the life of Jesus and 
the lives of all serious helpers of this world, that prayer 
256 



THE PREACHER—A MAN OF PRAYER. 


is a necessity. “The place where prayer is wont to 
be made” is the most dynamical power-plant on this 
earth. Here swing in tireless though not effortless pre¬ 
cision and control the dynamos that suck from the at¬ 
mosphere of God the power which may be transmitted 
to the race of man and minister to its necessities. 

The Bible men of worth all prayed. It is likely 
that if we knew the inner tragic story of the down¬ 
fall of Judas Iscariot we should find that he was prayer¬ 
less, that he said the Lord’s Prayer instead of praying 
it. The man prone to prayer would not have had the 
callosity of heart to have received bread and hospi¬ 
tality from Jesus’ hand, and then have gone calmly 
out into the secret dark to sell the Lord for thirty 
silver pieces. Nor, had he been a man of prayer, would 
he, with the clatter of silver coins rattling in his ears 
like distempered bells ringing on a stormy night, have 
hanged himself. Praying men are not suicides when 
they are in their reason. I have often sat in subdued 
speculation, seeing the ground is so holy, and consid¬ 
ered with myself what reception had been accorded 
Judas by the Christ when death was past and Resur¬ 
rection come, if he had sorrowed, yet not as without 
hope, and had repented with tears bitterer than we 
may guess, and only such as those who have repented 
of their sins can catch black vision of, and had had 
a broken and contrite heart, whether instead of the 
tragic pathos of his story it might have been that in¬ 
stead of, “And Jesus appeared first unto Peter,” 
then that the sacred writer might have written, “He 
appeared first unto Judas, then unto Peter,” and I 
17 257 


THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


firmly believe it of my Christ, so mysterious a love is 
His—that great Forgiver, who past seventy times seven 
will pardon—“though our sins be as scarlet,” would 
have taken Judas back into His heart of love and would 
have wiped away those rushing tears and said, “Take 
heart; show thyself My man.” Such love is not past 
our Christ. It is like Him. 

Judas did not pray; but Peter prayed. He denied 
Christ; he cursed, saying, “I know not the man;” then, 
feeling the Savior’s sad eyes riveted upon his blasphe¬ 
mous cowardice, went out and wept bitterly—I hear the 
drip of those hot tears fast falling as the rain—and then 
he prayed! Thus he found his way back to Jesus, and 
became a captain for the Christ, and “endured hard¬ 
ness as a good soldier.” That miracle had no explana¬ 
tion save by the one word, “prayer.” The Prodigal 
Son finds his weary way back to the Father’s house. 
“Father, I have sinned,” and then his prayer is drowned 
by the father’s kisses on his lips. 

The men of the kingdom, whosoever these men may 
be, were all men of prayer: Enoch, Abraham, Moses, 
Elijah, Elisha, Isaiah, Amos, or that innumerable “com¬ 
pany of whom the world was not worthy”—all were 
mighty men of prayer. “The prayers of the saints” is 
the incense of the heavenly temple. The martyrs 
jp*ayed. Men at the stake had ecstasy because they held 
communion with God. The Rutherfords, the John 
Eliots, the John Walshes, the Luthers, the McCheynes, 
the Hanningtons, the Hebers, the Livingstones, the 
Asburys, the Morrisons, all have prayed their troubled 
ways through seas of heartache. These all have mas- 
258 


THE PREACHER—A MAN OF PRAYER. 


tered the liturgy of prayer. Nothing about City Road 
Chapel brings tears to the heart like John Wesley’s 
prayer-room. That is the cathedral. 

Luther’s motto was, ^^Bene orasse est hene studisse,** 
—“to have prayed well is to have studied well.” It is 
the magnificent motto of a magnificent man, which 
might be trumpeted skyward to all strong men of God. 
He does not make prayer a substitute for study, nor 
use prayer as a lazy man’s substitute; not that, but 
that from prayer and in prayer comes vision, comes 
might, comes approach, comes the secret of the Lord, 
which may be rendered literally, “the whisper of the 
Lord.” So close to God that the whisper of the Lord 
reaches the heart of those that fear him. So close to 
God as to hear His whisper. Such a closeness comes 
from prayer. 

If at groping moments of the soul’s infidelity it 
ever comes upon us that prayer is subjective and has 
no real activity and energy with God, let Christ’s 
prayers beckon us back to reason and religion and ac- 
I cess. He prayed. On the mountain, by the sea, in 
the garden, in death chambers, by the grave of His 
beloved, before the breaking of bread, at the parting 
of His disciples, and on the cross, Christ prayed; and 
Christ came forth from the Father, with whom He was 
; before worlds were. Christ’s prayers are plain pleas 
! for help. He wanted God: He needed God: He knew 
God helped: He knew that prayer was the mode of ac¬ 
cess and success with God. These things He knew. 
Christ did not speculate on any subject, much less did 
He speculate on prayer. He never acted on the as- 
259 





THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


sumption that God had to be persuaded. That is a 
weak and wicked view of prayer; but He was per¬ 
suaded that by prayer new and wonderful things were 
possible with God. He knew. You can not conceive He 
was beating the air when He prayed. “Let this cup 
pass; nevertheless, not as I will, but as Thou wilt.” 
How Jesus packed His life with prayer! From first 
to last His life was an anabasis of prayer. Who come 
close to God, must pray. The preacher must get close 
to God. 

There are no rules for prayer. There is no schedule 
for a preacher’s life for so much prayer and at such 
a time. A preacher’s life is not a time-card. “Pray 
without ceasing,” said one specialist at prayer. How 
prayer attuned him I To keep the vernacular of heaven 
not only on the lips, but on the hands and in the feet 
and in every faculty, “I want the Lord,” that is prayer. 
“I am God’s man; I love my Lord; I must be close to 
Him; I want to talk with Him,”—that is prayer, and 
that is an atmosphere, rather than a printed rule. 

Thomas a Kempis was in an ether of prayer, as 
any one will be impressed that reads him with respectful 
attention. The preacher does not come to the phrase, 
“Let us pray,” in the privacy of his own life. Nothing 
interrupts him: in the day, when crowded on by many 
thoughts: in the evening, when the shadows fall: in 
the night, when he wakens for a moment, his lips will 
pray aloud, “Blessed Christ, I love Thee and Thou 
lovest me;” and this is prayer. 

A liftle child was asleep by her father. The night 
was dark and far spent; and when it was at its darkest 
260 


THE PREACHER—A MAN OF PRAYER. 


the baby, awaking, reaching out, groping, arms found 
its father’s neck, snuggled close, saying, sleepily: ‘‘Oo 
dere. Daddy? Oo dere?” “I am here, dear heart,” 
the father said, wide-awake at the touch of the baby’s 
hand, and his arms were about her. “All right, dear 
Daddy,” said the sleepy voice, and snuggled the head 
close against the father’s heart, and fell, in a moment, 
fast asleep. That is a parable of prayer, the preach¬ 
er’s prayer. “Are you there, my Father?” “I am 
here.” “All right, my Father which art in heaven.” 
This is prayer at petition and at reply, all there. 

The preacher is a man of prayer. That is his con¬ 
stant employment. He does not stop to pray: he 
simply does not stop from prayer. And when God 
hears his voice. He calleth His own sheep by name, 
and leadeth him out. O blessed beatitude of prayer! be 
thou on every preacher’s heart. 


261 



The Preacher and the Ages. 

This talk about the present age is mainly parrot 
talk. We are all a little tired, when truth is told, hear¬ 
ing about the “Zeitgeist.” It sounds a little foreign 
and is decidedly German, which would have endeared 
it forever to the heart of Joseph Cook, who fairly 
beamed when he tumbled the name of a German or the 
phrase of a German on his tongue. That was a pleas¬ 
ing idiosyncrasy of a great brain: for a great brain 
was what Joseph Cook had. The spirit of the age! 
Eheu! as Brother ^neas would have glibly said. To 
hear that phrase bathed in as in briny water, is really 
a trifle humorous. It is so easy to get lost in a phrase, 
especially when some one other than yourself built the 
phrase. Phrases current are really microbes and do 
much damage to the immature. 

No hint is here given that there is not such a thing 
as the spirit of the age. Every age has its atmosphere, 
which is only another way of declaring that every age 
has its own personality. A thing worth remembering 
because it puts a thinker on its guard against lumping 
off any number of centuries together. But the per¬ 
petual basking in the sentence, “the spirit of the age,” 
becomes very misleading to such as have the spirit of 
the ages to consider. The spirit of an age is one thing: 
the spirit of the ages is another thing. And those who 
262 


THE PREACHER AND THE AGES. 


are inebriated by the spirit of the age are very liable 
to the disease of being insular and inconveniently con¬ 
temporaneous. 

The preacher has more to do with the spirit of the 
ages than with the spirit of the age. The latter is 
sporadic: the former is endemic: and the endemic move¬ 
ments and moods are the world moods and the world 
movements. A preacher must not be engulfed in the 
now. He must be at home in the now; but his real 
residence is in all times and in all eternities. A preacher 
is universal. His speech is polyglottous. He hears the 
reverberations of all the waves that ever beat on shores 
of human story. While a century or a generation has a 
characteristic tendency, we must not be allured by that 
false light. The tendency which is perpetual is the 
chief consideration to every worker in the world’s widest 
life. Human nature is the same it always has been. 
Human morals are bettering, human ideals are grow¬ 
ing more sunny, altruism is becoming more general and 
powerful; but the subliminal life of mankind, both in 
mind and soul, is identical the world drama through. 
We feel absolutely at home with Shakespeare’s men and 
with Shakespeare’s women, and with Chaucer’s men and 
with Chaucer’s women, with the gloomy characters of 
yEschylus, with the many mouthing men of Homer, 
with the Bible folk, with the noisy conquerors of the 
world, the personages of Plutarch and of Cicero’s let¬ 
ters. There are no modems and no ancients in souls, nor 
any spirit in the long run but the spirit of the ages. 
It is wonderful as one thinks over the history and bi¬ 
ography and literature of the world, how alike life is 
263 


THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


from age to age, how the dissimilarities of race and 
time are ironed out and the vast similarities of soul and 
soul issues are regnant all days and all wheres. Women 
are women whatever language they speak, or whatever 
color they are. The heart is the same with them all. 
We are brethren from age to age. We would feel quite 
at home with Abraham or Ezekiel or Isaiah or Daniel 
or Saul of Tarsus or David the shepherd king. The 
whole round world is knit together, and the whole round 
of history is related. Whatever the actual status of 
the doctrine of evolution may be, we may know assuredly 
that there has been no evolution in the character of 
the human being since that race has chronicled its first 
dim memorabilia. To read Plato first and last seems 
so modern a matter that when a body has lifted his 
weary eyes from the Greek page whereon these old rea¬ 
sonings were writ, he can scarcely wipe his eyes open 
to the belief that he has read old-age philosophizings 
or if he read the most modem doubt which takes to 
itself airs as being something quite astounding, it 
sounds so like the ancient skepticisms that he thinks he 
is hearing the rehearsal of antique doubts; or if one 
waste a space of time in reading some modem sophis¬ 
tries, misnamed science or religion, as the case may hap, 
he will inform himself that here is an old heathenism 
and Hinduism once more lifting up its lean visage to 
the light. 

Now let us settle it that the world in all ages is 
really its own contemporary. In more ways than one 
are we brought to face the giant word of the Holy 
Book about God—“a thousand years are as yesterday 
264 


THE PREACHER AND THE AGES. 


when it is past, and like a watch in the night.” The 
flight of years has indeed changed surroundings, but 
not occupants. We dress differently, but we act co¬ 
herently with the actions of a race. How did the poli¬ 
tics of Julius Csesar’s time differ from the politics in 
William Taft’s time? The demagogue then is brother 
to the demagogue now, and the man out was eager to 
be in, and was certain that the man in power was a 
rogue, an arrant rogue, and the man out of power 
was the high patriot, and the crafty Cassius, with his 
lean soul, was directing the energies of the subalterns 
toward the enthronement of himself. No, we are at 
heart by nature as we were. Who knows not that knows 
little of history and has need to school himself in the 
alphabet of character. Our morals are better; our 
behavior is better; but what we are better we are by the 
grace of God, and not by the grace of our own nature. 
The state of human nature is fitted to give the ques¬ 
tion to evolution as a theory. We are as they were; 
they were as we are. 

The master matters then are the master matters now. 
The fact of sin then is the fact of sin now. Men have 
with the red ax hewed wildly at the heart to cut its 
leprosy away; but the leprosy can not be cut away. 
It must be cleansed away. The remedies which have 
been offered while the race was shaken with its ague, 
which no change of climate could cure, nor in any 
marked degree abate, are incompetent. They are not 
drugs; they are nostrums. Pity the preacher who 
thinks the present the engrossing fact of theology. 
Theology is flaunted with making little of this pres- 
265 


THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


ent time and of this present world, which is a pointless 
sword wherewith to thrust Christianity, for the reason 
that the best friends this present world has are these 
same Christians. They are the ameliorators of the 
world. Christianity can get out a patent on philan¬ 
thropy. They are the sole world lovers. Such as are 
humanitarians and are not Christians have learned their 
philanthropy from Christ, though they are not strict 
in their acknowledgment of sources of their inspiration 
and enlightenment and leadership. 

But the basis of the accusation against Christian¬ 
ity is that Christians do not believe this is the only 
scene. They see the long ages coming as well as the 
lost ages going. They know that the vast issues of 
the soul are issues of eternity. They know the kinship 
of mankind. They need not to hear any one affirm 
that God hath made of one blood all races of the world. 
Their reason teaches them that: their observation of 
pyramid and coliseum and tournament and throne and 
habitation and graveyard teaches that. They feel the 
cohesion of peoples. They know that a present time 
has the background of past time and the foreground 
of eternity; and hold this sense of the august vastness 
of the landscape on which we dwell, and the mighty 
horde of adventurers on the far journey with which 
ourselves are mixed, and whose footfalls make ocean- 
mooded music to which we time our soldier goings as 
to thunders set to music. And they know the coli¬ 
seum in which the centuries gather is the coliseum of 
eternity. 

This is what the preacher keeps in the foreground 

266 


THE PREACHER AND THE AGES. 

of his consciousness; he never forgets it. He is ad¬ 
dressing immortals on the theme of the ages. Does 
any preacher now, preaching repentance to any sin¬ 
ner, diverge from the clamor of Peter’s voice? Why 
truly not. The same gospel is preached, please God, 
with the same power, because the same old ailment is 
on the same old hearts. Men of the agnostic temper 
and the materialistic temper are fond of hooting at 
the idea of the depravity of the race and the fall of 
man; and crass thinkers are swift to show how evolu¬ 
tion has superseded the theory of the fall. But when 
their lip-deep laughter has silenced a little you may 
hear from the throats of the men who are not dull 
nor dumb to their own hearts the cry, tear-soaked and 
wet with blood, “Who shall deliver me from this body 
of death?” Who made that cry? Saul of Tarsus 
made that cry. No, William of America made that 
cry. That is a world cry. That is the cry of Au¬ 
gustine and Socrates and of St. Simeon Stylites and 
Wesley and Luther and your next-door neighbor and 
yourself, whosoever you be. The sense of world de¬ 
pravity stays. It can not be permanently ignored 
any more than disease can permanently be ignored. It 
is a world stress. Depravity is no theological ghost- 
face. We could ignore that; but it is the lone cry 
of the wan centuries. “We do not ignore the facts,” 
is all that may be set down about the preacher when 
he refuses to be jostled from his feet by the present 
age and elects to stand with all the ages. You can 
feel one time; but you can not feel all times. The 
sanities will in the long run own the road. 

267 


THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


This planet on which we are at work and play is 
wise. Its astronomy is just. The planet refuses to 
stay on one side of the sun. It swerves not from its 
path till it has circumnavigated the sun. A silly soul 
in summer time might declare from his present posi¬ 
tion that the world was all summer, or a visitant in 
winter could with equal cogency affirm the world is 
all winter, but who stay here aU the twelvemonth will 
be able to record the totality of fact, which is that 
the world swung clean round the sun, nearer and re¬ 
moter. The history of the entire ride round the sun 
was the accurate history. The rest was fragmentary 
history and therefore inaccurate, and in a last flat 
word, untruthful. 

“What have the ages to say.^” is the sane inquiry. 
The Spirit of the Ages, that is the valid Zeitgeist we 
are after, who are bent on the quest of souls and the 
right interpretation of history. 

The preacher must not be brow-beaten by the vol¬ 
ubilities of the superficial who are content in this pres¬ 
ent and who want a man to discuss the affairs of this 
world only. All who surrender to that plea will find 
themselves chirping cheap music like a cricket in a 
field. The gospel these men profess and desire is lit¬ 
tle. It need not now be said that it is anything else. 
Littleness is a crime when the world is big. A little 
theology, you may depend upon it, is a false theology. 
Men are century plants, the everlasting century plants, 
and must have the sunlight from the far-off and far-up 
heavens to light their far-goings; and they must have 
the wisdoms that are wiser than all men, and the sa- 
268 


THE PREACHER AND THE AGES. 


gacities more sagacious than earth knows how to sup¬ 
ply, lest they miss the road, the long, eventful, perilous, 
glorious road that walks out across the landscape of 
eternity. 

**Our little systems have their day. 

They have their day and cease to be ;** 

but the larger system, the vast unexplored system of 
God, has not a day to come and shine and pass, but 
has the immense orbit of the aeons, and shall never 
cease to be. 

So the preacher is not worthy of commiseration who 
holds to the spirit of the ages in preference to the 
spirit of the age. He has in so doing done as Mary, 
chosen the better part, which shall never be taken from 
him. 


269 


The Poet and the Preacher.* 


The preacher is every man’s good brother. He 
is God’s licensed lover of the best. The best men, 
measures, manners, places, vocations, avocations, neigh¬ 
borhoods, doings, sayings, all catch his eye and heart, 
and hold them in loving fealty. This it is that makes 
the preacher’s business and life unapproachable for 
beauty. His vocation is as stately as Edinburgh, as 
beautiful as Naples, and as bewildering as a great me¬ 
tropolis. He is not common man, nor hath common 
method nor intent in life. He comes to help the cause 
of goodness on. He challenges men and women, say¬ 
ing, “Have ye seen God to-day?” He has the aposto- 
late for virtue, ethics, Christ, Christianity. He belongs 
to all worlds. He speaks in the vernacular of the 
highest thought and love and hope and dream. No 
things lie below his horizon. He marches toward the 
eternal dawn, and so has all the daylight along the 
path he takes. Like Saint Christopher, he serves the 
highest; and his commission is signed of Christ. Now, 
seeing the preacher is such a man—so boundless in 
purpose and high in his aspirings, and blood relative 
to the divinities in time and eternity—it can but be 

*This chapter is reprinted from this author’s volume on 
“LoweU.” 


270 



THE POET AND THE PREACHER. 


that he will find himself homesick for the most elect 
fellowship earth supplies. We would think it of him 
in theory, and find it of him in fact. This is the halo 
about a preacher’s head—that good things beckon to 
him as familiar friends. There is no compliment like 
that—none. Preacher, if you saw Elia going along 
your street, would you not hug up to him? Or if 
the broad-browed Plato meditated along some aca¬ 
deme, would you not beat time with your feet to his 
measured goings, and with your brain and heart to 
his wide sayings? Or if ^schylus, with his winter 
locks, should mumble to himself some strophes from 
his “Agamemnon,” would you not listen? Or if Fran¬ 
cis Bacon read over to himself his essay on “Atheism,” 
would you not thank your stars that you were there 
to hear him read it? Or if Alexander Smith were writ¬ 
ing “Dreamthorp,” or Emerson his essay on “Beauty,” 
would you not say the day you spent in their society 
was a marked day in your calendar? A preacheFs 
affiliations are princely. He belongs to all fraternities 
of noble worth without the trouble of joining. He 
is born to them. Every high thing fits his hand as 
if it were a sword made for his sole using. Botany, 
astronomy, philosophy, biology, psychology, chemistry, 
literature, painting, architecture, eloquence, poetry, do 
not need to plead with him for a hearing. He sits 
an eager auditor to all they have to say. When I 
think what a preacher is, how far and high his thought 
may aspire to soar, how long a journey he enters on 
with his own feet, how unequivocal his position on all 
things pertaining to virtue, how certified a champion 
271 


THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


he is of weakness and worth, how God lets him talk 
about His own and one Son, Jesus Christ—then I 
laugh out loud, nor can forbear my laughter. 

Prayer I assume to be the highest expression of 
the human soul, and next to prayer is poetry. As a 
method of speech, then, poetry is the soul’s highest 
form of utterance. What need, then, to suggest that 
poetry and the preacher are necessitated friends? I 
assume that since the apostolic days preaching, as 
preaching, has never soared so high as in Henry Ward 
Beecher. There were in him an exhaustlessness and 
an exuberance, an insight deep as the soul, a power 
to turn a light like sunlight for strength on the sore 
weakness of humanity, a bewilderment of approach to 
the heart to tempt it from itself to God that I find 
nowhere else; and it has been my pleasure to be a wide 
reader of the sermonic literature of the world. Com¬ 
pared to him, Berry, the English preacher, whom 
Beecher thought most apt to be his successor in the 
Plymouth pulpit, and who was invited by that church 
to such successorship—Berry was an instrument of a 
couple of strings matched with Beecher’s harp of gold. 
Phillips Brooks can not in any just sense be put along¬ 
side him; and Simpson in his genius was essentially 
extemporaneous and insular. Beecher was perpetual, 
like the eternal springs. In Robertson of Brighton 
are some symptoms of Beecher, but they are cameo 
and not building stone resemblances. Beecher was the 
past master of our preaching art. Storrs and Beecher 
were contemporaries in the same city. Storrs was a 
field of cloth of gold. Gorgeous he was, and a man 
272 


THE POET AND THE PREACHER. 


of might. But you can not get from the thought of 
effort in him in his effects. In Beecher is no sense of 
effort, any more than in a sea bird keeping pace with 
a rushing ship. As I have seen birds sail hour on 
hour and never flap a wing, and yet dig down into 
valleys, and rise high, where the blue sky was dappled 
with its clouds, so Beecher does. In him are the ef¬ 
fortless music and might of a vast reserve of power. 
Now, this estimate of Beecher may be right or wrong. 
I give it as my estimate of him. He has no successor, 
as Samson had no son. Now, how did Beecher stand 
related to poetry.^ I urge this concrete case because 
it affords an expeditious way of getting at the vital¬ 
ities of this theme. Beecher never quoted poetry. But 
Beecher never quoted the Bible, the reason being that 
he was not possessed of a memoriter memory, just as 
Joseph Parker was not. But he held the Bible in solu¬ 
tion as the sea holds salt, or the sun holds iron and gold. 
All things told, it were better to be saturated with a 
thing, and hold it in your blood, than to be plastered 
over with a thing. Beecher in his earlier Plymouth 
pulpit days preached Bible, its spirit, urgency, central 
loveliness, light, penetration, not less certainly because 
he seldom gives an exact phrasing from the book. 
He does the same with poetry. Neither from hymn 
book nor volume of anybody’s poetry do you hear 
Beecher quote; but he is soaked with poetry. He is 
a poet. 

Hear him pray, and you must see that. In ex¬ 
temporaneous prayer I have observed that the actual 
spirit of a soul becomes apparent as in no other part 
18 273 


THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


of life. When a man prays he is, so to say, off guard. 
He looks out and a long way off. Himself is left in 
the wake like the shimmer in a vessel’s track. His 
spirit walks without help. Reading prayers cuts the 
life off from its highest opportunity of taking its 
truest flight and highest. So in Parker, nothing is 
quite so noble as his praying; and Beecher—^his prayers 
have wings, as God’s doves do. What music and touch 
of deep truth—only a touch like an angel’s wing might 
give as the angel swept too near a child asleep; but 
the touch was a revelation, and was, therefore, suffi¬ 
cient. Beecher was a poet, and poets do not need 
padding. 

The poet sees. That is surely what a preacher 
needs to do. The poet sees the stars and the flush 
on cheek of woman or of cloud, and the dim violet 
and Indian summer and hooting owl, though he hides 
in shadows, and the cornfields and the marshes by the 
sea, and the “flower in the crannied wall,” and the 
dishevelment of the old ocean, and the pomp of au¬ 
tumn, and the needs of men and their hungers and 
their thirsts, and their trials and their bitterness, and 
their upleaps and their downfalls—sees men and things, 
and fates and futures. Know you anything the poets 
have not seen ? Goethe saw, though he knew not that he 
saw it, that sin was its own Nemesis. That is “Faust.” 
Tennyson saw that environment as the explanatory 
clause of life was frivolous, and wrote the “Idylls of 
the King.” Wordsworth saw the hills and Rydal 
Water, and learned the wonder of them by heart; and 
some of us have loved him for the thing he did, and 
274 


THE POET AND THE PREACHER. 


shall love him all our days. In a vile age Edmund 
Spenser saw that virtue alone was beautiful, and wrote 
“The Faerie Queene,” than which no sweeter proc¬ 
lamation has ever been made of the white beauty of 
truth and goodness save by Jesus only. One of the 
elect spirits of the world, who had kept his life white, 
a devotee of duty, who had been in elbow touch with 
England’s greatest ruler, Oliver Cromwell, who, when 
he saw the Puritan defeated not by arms—the Cava¬ 
lier could not do that—but by the insane hunger for 
a king, when his blindness made his life a starless night, 
yet not so dark he could not see great Cromwell ex¬ 
humed and hung on high for villainy to laugh at, 
when himself thought each step coming to his impov¬ 
erished door was an officer’s step which meant his ar¬ 
rest, then he gloomed his great soul in the tragedy 
of “Paradise Lost.” He housed all the Puritan fail¬ 
ure in that gloomy,' glorious house, but came to his 
larger self once more and strove to write “Paradise 
Regained,” which should in reason have blazed with 
glory, but did not. He could not so rise from eclipse. 
Those poems are the story of a great spirit in eclipse, 
struggling yet to trample the darkness down and stum¬ 
ble into light. Chaucer is a man who sees and en¬ 
joys his world, and in him is a lusty love of life much 
worthier than the feminine view of life sometimes af¬ 
forded us. Bryant is the poet of outdoors; and we 
are outdoor folk. Longfellow is the poet of indoors 
and twilights and the lighting of the lamp; and there 
are indoor folk to whom ministers must minister. Poe 
is the poet of .intoxicants, and lives in a weird world, 
2Y5 


THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 

which we must look full in the face as men. Whit¬ 
tier is the man in love with goodness, and at one with 
God, and sure of the eternal boundaries of the home¬ 
land of the soul. Lowell is the scholar breaking into 
life. Bums is a man blurting out his weaknesses and 
woes and, like a selfishness he was, bringing himself 
uppermost at every breath, and yet a man whose words 
had bird song in them; and songs of birds are worth 
more than gold to a roomy life. Dante was sure of 
retribution, unless pardon stepped in for a soul’s re¬ 
lease. Sophocles is crushed with a sense of something 
outside ourselves which makes our lives. But enough 
is said to justify my words, “The poet sees.” Hav¬ 
ing eyes he uses them, which is quite the reverse of 
most men and women. The novelists who write those 
tender and heavenly episodes from common life are 
simply folks who have eyes to see those things we are 
blind to. The preacher should be at one with poets, 
because they have seen the land, and all of it. Among 
them, they have missed nothing. If we were to ask 
for a dragoman who should interpret us to earth, and 
earth to us, and leave no lonely cranny unvisited, whom 
should we seek but poets? They have hit all the keys 
having music in them. They have gone wherever life 
has gone, or nature or God. I think it practically 
impossible to read all of Tennyson, for instance, and 
not have a wide-open eye to nature and to its inter¬ 
pretive quality. I think it impossible to read Shake¬ 
speare and not fall in love with life. I think it rare 
to find a common reader of Shelley without the sense 
of the jar and lack of destination in him, or of By- 
276 


THE POET AND THE PREACHER. 


ron without a haunting sense of the deviltry of per¬ 
petual selfishness. In themselves, or vicariously, if I 
may so say, poets have been or seen or experienced 
the round of life. To be with such sight-seers is to 
fill the soul with windows open on every street the 
wide world has. Preachers use books of illustration 
instead of being books of illustration, for the simple 
reason that they were never trained to see things and 
men and wonders. Homegrown illustrations are man¬ 
ifestly better than tropic illustrations, just as home¬ 
grown fruit is best. To the seeing eye, the universe 
is at our door. Here is Emerson’s value. He is dis¬ 
jointed, mumbling, ambling, but sees things, wades 
where the grasses and flowers and thistles of life are 
knee-deep. Seeing is another name for insight. In¬ 
sight into care, want, humility, foolish pride, sham 
penitence, hid grief, intemperance of attitude, hysteria 
in static if not in dynamic state, mental parsimony, 
or mental ill-breeding, the hopes which may legiti¬ 
mately be placed in man—insight into these things is 
so major a necessity with a preacher as to belong to 
his alphabet needs. Where shall he learn them with 
so little sweat and in such royal company as with the 
poets ? 

The poet feels. And life is feeling. Life is not 
ratiocinative process any more than the world is a field 
of ice. Life scorches. It has volcanoes that blister 
the pavements, and choke the air, and summers that 
thaw winters out, and breed flowers and aromas. He 
who has not felt has not lived. The human touch is 
the touch of feeling. These lonely mountain peaks of 
277 



THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 

mind are breeders of snow fields, not forests. It is 
with exertion that one convinces himself that Kant 
was a man. He might have passed for a logical or 
philosophical machine. I can hear the wheels turn in 
him, and they need oiling. The frigid zones are not 
marketable as the temperate zones. The mind market 
may be deserted, but the heart market is always crowded. 
Christ was a Sun and thawed life. There are no ice¬ 
bound coasts where Christ is risen. The reason why 
Jesus was not a thaumaturgist was that His wonders 
were spilled out of a bleeding, genial, compassionate 
heart. He felt so that he stopped the widow on her 
way to the house where her children and her husband 
lay together dead, and would not let her put her only 
son there yet. “He had compassion on her.” Men 
can not forget those words. His miracles were wrung 
out of Him for pity’s sake^ and that keeps them human, 
and makes them divine. To feel is what changes trees 
to animals. The hacked tree makes no moan; the 
hacked man bleeds and swoons and moans in his stupor 
of sleep. Feeling is the mighty fact of life. He who 
would have ingress and egress with lives must feehv 
And the poets have felt. They among them wear the 
world on their heart. Just as we have seen bell-ringers 
run the gamut of intricate musical compositions among 
them by reaching the bell that held the note their 
music called for, so the poets ring out the feeling of 
this world of hearts, and among them have missed no 
note. David felt; and that is why he sobbed out .peni¬ 
tential grief which leaves no need for any penitent to 
invent a tear or any anguish. He may borrow all of 
278 


THE POET AND THE PREACHER. 

David. His sobbing helps the world. Homer had the 
blood of forty thousand battles in his veins, and so 
has set battle for the centuries. The “Iliad” is the 
battle-field of mankind. Tasso had crusaders’ marches 
and triumphs and wounds in him, and so “Jerusalem 
Delivered” is the crusader’s epic. It matches the cru¬ 
sade of soul to this last hour. Homer had innumer¬ 
able adventures in his breast, and so wrote the “Odys- 
sey,” which is the laureate poem of adversity and ad¬ 
venture and discovery, and will have no competitor. 
Ulysses lives forever the antagonist of angry seas and 
foreign shores. Jean Ingelow felt, and so has found 
the heart of life listening to her. Mrs. Browning 
felt with that wild wonder of a woman’s love, and so 
man and woman want her as they want a mother. Keats 
felt aspirations, dim, dreamy, unclassifiable; and he 
makes a sky for dreams to soar in. How does life 
feel? Well, poets know. Life does feel—are we al¬ 
ways very sure of that? Jesus was; and Jesus was 
Chief of poets. The poets are, if I may put it so 
rudely, a hospital ward in which lie all the feelings 
of mankind, and walking through that ward you shall 
hear the laments and paeans life is capable of. The 
preacher who does not feel sin, and feel woe, and feel 
heartache, and feel the anguish the penitent knows, 
and feel the hunger which eats into the flesh, and feel 
the laughter a child and a lover exult in, and feel the 
progress of heart from lower to higher, and feel the 
languor which makes men fall asleep while they walk 
the road with their knapsacks on their shoulders, and 
feel that life needs heartening, and feel that life is 
279 


THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 

competent for help—^that preacher might as well be 
dead. 

The poet has dealt with the most vital problems. 
And the preacher, provided he be true to his legacy 
of divine serviceableness, has the most vital of all vi¬ 
talities to present. He and the poet, then, are close 
of kin. I think to illustrate the truth of this propo¬ 
sition from one poet. Browning. Browning has dealt 
with divorce, marriage for position, heredity, environ¬ 
ment, and the failure of both in both directions, sin 
as a palpable and monstrous fact, forgiveness, hypoc¬ 
risy self-justified, the failure for the largest by the 
lack of deep feeling, the passion and power of music, 
the defect of the artistic temperament, motherhood, 
herohood, old age beautiful and beneficent, old age 
crabbed as gnarled wild crabapples in early autumn, 
lust, scholarship, humbuggery, intellect, the poet, 
smirched virtue, conscience, consciencelessness, love, be¬ 
wilderment, life as a whole, duty, unknown helpers of 
life, love above position, the moral sense, natural the¬ 
ology, Christ, belief in God, triumphant optimism, joy 
in life, husbandhood, wifehood, longing, hope. His 
soundings are deep, and stretch over wide areas of the 
sea of the soul. He dredges where he sounds. I have 
not enumerated his themes, but have suggested a suffi¬ 
cient number to indicate how vast the themes he battles 
with unbewildered. The preacher who has the great 
theme would do well to fraternize with those to whom 
great themes are very natural, and who live in the 
same' house with vital problems. 

Poets know the soul. I will illustrate this from 
280 


THE POET AND THE PREACHER. 


Shakespeare. I make bold in saying, that no study 
of psychology, under any tutor, with dark room of 
physiological psychologist, can compare with a study 
of Shakespeare, for a preacher’s help. He knew the 
soul, and walked around through it as a man walks 
through a familiar street risking no hurt, because he 
knows the way so well. Shakespeare knows no im¬ 
pediments. All roads are open to him. “As You Like 
It,” while some preachers might think the forest of 
Arden, and Rosalind, and Jaques beneath them and 
their study, is worth more than some dry course on 
theology or economics. You get to know womanhood 
and manhood in Shakespeare. You can not go from 
him, in my belief, and not be something of a savant 
in human nature. He shows the thing rather than 
tells it. Coarseness of nature, fineness of nature, in¬ 
tense thought, lack of any thought, honor of dubita- 
tive cast, and honor which has no lack, the simpleton, 
the maniac, the conceited donkey of two legs, the as- 
ininity of drunkenness, the nemesis of courses of sin, 
the hellishness of sin-mixed genius, the dolt and the 
genius, the gentleman and the libidinous beast mis¬ 
called a man, the differentiations of vice in individual 
make-up, the clarity of virtue especially in women— 
these and more make Shakespeare the preacher’s school¬ 
master in psychology. 

The poet is creative. Giving this matter thought, 
that is a distinguished credential. God is Chief Creator 
as He is Chief of everything good. His versatility 
is our amazement and His glory. He is the Maker, 
the Poet. He is to make all things new, and has made 
281 


THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


all things new. His leaves and fruits and ferns and 
cliffs are creations which make words poor in telling 
their grace and beauty. Poets emulate God in their 
limits. They are men. He is God. But what they 
have created is a fabulous wealth. “The Faerie Queene” 
is as certainly a creation as a star is, and its light as 
gentle and enduring. In poets is creative genius as 
above all other artisans. They are making so that 
even their rehabilitations are creations, as one may know 
by noting Shakespeare’s historical characters and stud¬ 
ies. Who shall say that Mark Antony is not as original 
a person as Rosalind? Life leaps in the veins of what 
the poets do; and their poems and stratagems and 
characters are fresh contributions to the thought of 
men. The preacher is creative. No sermon is a work 
of art, which is a hewed thing whether from marble, 
wood, or words, but a formed thing, a life which grew 
with urgency like the willows by the stream. Not to 
feel that a sermon is as certainly a creation as a tele¬ 
scope or a poem or a book, is for a preacher to find 
himself among the rubbish of the world’s camp. Men 
who hear should feel that whom they hear is a cre¬ 
ator, and what they hear a fresh thing filled with life 
like a trailing arbutus. For a preacher to feel so is 
to kill the drudgery of sermon making, and to lift it 
to the realm of music and sculpture. 

The poets breed inspiration in a life as a sunrise 
breeds morning. And do I need to adduce illustra¬ 
tions of this? I wot not. “Abide with Me,” was like 
a first sight of the sea to me. I recall its dawn on 
my heart as if it were not years ago in college days, 
282 


THE POET AND THE PREACHER. 


but last night. Preachers ought to give off inspira¬ 
tion as central suns give light, heat, power. A preacher 
who does not inspire is not worth his keep. To inspire 
means to keep close to inspirations. Nor is it to the 
point to say that a preacher has all inspiration in his 
Master. That is quite true; but it is also true that 
Christ is the poet’s Master, and sets the fire a-glowing 
in the poet’s heart; and as Jesus gladdened His eyes 
by looking on flower fields and fields of stars and on 
the sweet faces of little children, while and because 
he was God’s Son and fellowshiped with his Father, 
knowing that God ought to exclude nothing from us, 
but include all things for us, so preachers are to get 
inspirations from everywhere, and by being in Christ 
and for Him are qualified to get the most out which 
Christ has put in, just as a musician can best under¬ 
stand the music of a master. Poets are one of our 
Master’s ways of saying His say to our souls. 

Therefore, of all folks preachers and poets may 
well be the best of friends. The poet is he who stands 
above us nigher to the dawn, and calls down, like to 
old watchers from the temple’s citadel, “The morning 
breaketh; day is here.” 


283 


Cicero and Paul—A Contrast. 

When I first read Cicero’s letters I was thrilled, 
not less, by the letters touching his proconsulate in 
Asia. In his reciting the stages of his progress in 
the occupancy of his office he makes mention of so 
many places with which I found myself totally fa¬ 
miliar, but not only familiar with them as a student 
of classical history and geography, but familiar with 
them because I had learned them in reading the itin¬ 
erary of Paul, the apostle of Jesus Christ. And I 
confess, though it is years now since I first read those 
Cicero letters to his beloved Atticus—and though it 
is years now since I first felt that strange thrill, often 
as I have reread the letters, I can not yet dispossess 
myself of the old-time thrill that marches through my 
blood like beating drums. That Cicero of Rome, and 
that Saul of Tarsus, each in the occupancy of his 
office—no mean office—each as a Roman citizen, each 
as a statesman in his own sphere, that these men in 
the occupancy of their several offices crossed each 
other’s track, I am not quit of it, I will not be. I 
would impart to hearts a little of the thrill that came 
and comes to mine when I consider Marcus Tullius 
Cicero, greatest Roman orator, and Saul of Tarsus, 
greatest Jewish citizen, going from same province to 
same province, one man on his own business, the other 
284 


CICERO AND PAUL—A CONTRAST. 


man on God Christ’s business. The one man working 
solely for himself, the other man working solely for 
somebody else. 

Cicero served a year in the proconsular office. His 
proconsular part of Asia was Cilicia, which embraced 
not only Cilicia but Pamphylia, Lycaonia, part of 
Phrygia and the Island of Cyprus, and territories of 
the province of Asia not positively known. Cilicia 
had as capital city. Tarsus; and at Tarsus Saul was 
born. So that Cicero, greatest of the Roman orators, 
was proconsular prince over Cilicia, in whose capital 
was born the greatest of Hebrew orators. Cicero landed 
at Ephesus. Cicero marched through Syria, through 
Cilicia, through Cappadocia, came to Iconium, marched 
to Lycaonia, took his army through Galatia, and finally 
came down to Tarsus, native city of Saul, thence to 
the Isle of Rhodes, came thence to Athens, went, home¬ 
sick, hurrying toward Rome; and in the neighborhood 
of Rome he died, slain by the sword of Mark Antony, 
friend of Caesar. And in Rome Saul of Tarsus died, 
slain by the poisoned sword of the Emperor Nero. 
Two men, two pilgrims, two statesmen, two orators! 

Let the cities, localities, or governments Cicero 
touched or governed be set down in a list, so that 
we may have a bird’s-eye view of his Asiatic itinerary. 
His recital of his goings and comings has been given 
with painstaking exactitude in his letters to Atticus. 
Cicero was nothing, if not verbose. He spared no words, 
which has been an inestimable boon to the succeeding 
ages, because his gift of prolixity has afforded us the 
most precise view we possess of the Roman world. He 
285 


THE PASTOR-PREACHEK. 


spent ten whole days in Athens, “having made,” as 
he tells Atticus, “my journey through Greece with 
great applause.” He was ten days in sailing from 
Athens to Delos. He proceeded from the port of 
Athens, the Piraeus, in a Rhodian vessel, which he 
thought little of, it being undecked and not calcu¬ 
lated to resist the waves. He came by Zoster, Cea, 
Gyarus, and Scyros en route to Delos, and was met 
by an astonishing multitude at Samos, and landed at 
Ephesus on July S2d, expecting to reach his province 
by August 1st. He reached Laodicea on July 31st; 
thence he came to Lycaonia. Three days he spent in 
Laodicea, three at Apameia, three at Synnada. He 
says Cassius is in Antioch with his whole army, that 
he himself is in Cappadocia at the foot of Mount 
Taurus. He reviewed the army near Iconium, he re¬ 
ceived pressing messages from the Parthians, he en¬ 
tered Cilicia through the passes of Taurus (from the 
north), and came to Tarsus on October 5th; thence 
“I went to Mount Amanus, which divides Syria from 
Cilicia. My name was respected in Syria,” he naively 
remarks. “I went from Tarsus into Asia, I can not 
tell you with what admiration of the cities of Cilicia, 
and above all, of the Tarsians.” He held sessions of 
state in Pamphylia and Lycaonia. He comes via 
Rhodes to the Piraeus once more, and his year of Asi¬ 
atic banishment is ended. So here is the catalogue of 
places he has named or visited which touched the spark 
of our Scripture memory. Athens, Piraeus, Rhodes, 
Samos, Ephesus, Antioch in Syria, Laodicea, Cap¬ 
padocia, Parthia, Lycaonia, Iconium, Cilicia, Tarsus, 
286 


t^ICERO AND PAUL—A CONTRAST. 


Syria, Asia, Pamphylia. We seem to hear the steady 
tramp of Saul of Tarsus as he went across the Roman 
world. 

Now, whatever estimate you may retain concern¬ 
ing Cicero, you can not leave him out of the history 
of Rome. If you belittle him as Mommsen does in 
the greatest history of Rome written; if you load 
him with panegyrics as Middleton does, still you must 
reckon with him. You can not write a history of 
Rome and leave Marcus Tullius Cicero out. He was 
born 106 years before Christ, and was assassinated 
in the year 43 before Christ. He lived in the most 
eventful half-century of Roman history. He was a 
contemporary of Pompey, Crassus, and Caesar of the 
first triumvirate; and it is bruited abroad, with how 
much truth we can not answer, that Cicero might 
have changed the triumvirate of Rome into a qua- 
ternity. He was fast friend of Cato. He was the 
sworn friend of Cassius, the murderer; he was heart 
friend of Brutus, whose stab was the last stab that 
walked into the heart of Caesar and left it dry as a 
broken bottle in the sun. You can not escape him. 
He was not the greatest man in his day, but he was 
the most versatile man in Rome. I take it he was 
the greatest man Rome produced, save Julius Caesar 
only, who was a Hercules. All other men only reached 
to this Hercules’ belt. Cicero was an orator. We lads 
and lassies who studied Latin in the schools know that. 
The oratorical gift of Cicero chimes through the cen¬ 
turies. He was a writer of books on philosophy. He 
writer of the greatest series of letters that came 
287 


was 



THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


down to us from the noon of the Roman world. He 
was the greatest epistolary master that ever lived. 
Though books on books of his letters have been spilled 
into the seas, wrecked upon the violent waters of the 
centuries, yet we have over a thousand letters of Marcus 
Tullius Cicero, which constitute to the present the 
ablest biography of Rome yet written. 

I have read many of the histories of ancient Rome. 
I have gone nosing around in the nooks and crannies 
of that ancient day, when the men upon the seven hills 
of Rome mastered the earth and put their arms around 
the then known planet and were the first authentic 
masters of the mighty world, Europe, Asia, and Africa, 
and I always confess that for the inside history, for 
the downward look that sees the floor and for the up¬ 
ward look that sees the ceiling, and the outward look 
that sees the streets and mobs and armies of men and 
women and the enduring look that sees Rome as it 
was, those letters are without peer, and ring ever with 
unconscious fidelity. The Cicero letters are the most 
masterful exponents of that day and life. This man, 
therefore, you can not sneer him down. You may 
think him weak, weaker than water. Let that pass. 
You may think him to lack political conscience. Let 
that pass. You may think him to be unspeakably 
garrulous. Let that pass also. You may think him 
to be unspeakably vain. Let that also go. Yet across 
that landscape, gone long since, when you look to see 
the personalities who towered high as the Alps, amongst 
the faces which are indelibly limned against the blue 
of the far-off Roman sky, is that of Marcus Tullius 
288 


CICERO AND PAUL—A CONTRAST. 

Cicero. An excellent face, a clean face, chiseled out as 
by the sculptor’s hammer; lips that seemed as if they 
were only the door through which the raging words 
might rush in torrents toward the sea. And that man, 
who enthralled Rome with his eloquence of speech in 
the then two masterful languages of the then world, 
Latin and Greek, and spoke not only classical oratorical 
Latin, but wrote books in the Greek of Athens and 
the Latin of Rome; that man whose friendship Julius 
Caesar and Pompey courted; that man who was feted 
and loved for the time by the men who would kill 
Caesar and over his corpse march to supremacy, that 
man, we can not shunt him from the scene. We must 
listen to his voice. He was one of those types of men 
that knew he had two hands for a purpose. He knew 
that no one thing ought to include a man’s life, but 
fo be a man was to have room for a world. There¬ 
fore, though he was a statesman, though he was a 
consul, though he defeated Catiline’s conspiracy, though 
he had many callings, though his law business was 
pressing and very lucrative, though he was so busy, 
he had time to write multitudinous letters; he had 
time to be the greatest stylist of Roman literature; 
he had time to talk and say those words which bulk 
large in Roman letters, he had time to buy up libra¬ 
ries, ample for that time, he had time to buy statuary 
at the hands of his friend Atticus, he listened to the 
Roman world and said things which interpreted the 
life of the then world to the now world. And, what¬ 
ever your antipathies toward Marcus Tullius Cicero, 
you can not wipe his name from Roman history, nor 
19 289 



THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


can you push him out of the doors of Roman litera¬ 
ture. We have learned much of our Latin from him, 
as we have from the ‘‘Commentaries” of great Caesar, 
where the words seem as a soldier marching to the 
fray, where we saw races die and felt their gasp for 
breath. And we pass from this writing of the battle- 
mooded Caesar into that quiet mood of the stylist Cicero; 
and yet while we hold conference with him we seemed 
to be breathing the air of Rome. 

He saw the sky of Rome’s great capital. We walked 
with him down to the sea, and heard him converse 
with the leading spirits of his age. And Cicero was 
a man bulking great in Roman letters and in Roman 
oratory and in Roman statesmanship. He had his 
faults. He had many faults. He had great faults, 
and yet when we consider whose son he was; namely, 
Rome’s son, and remember that there were scarcely a 
dozen men alive in Rome exempt from graft, and that 
to this great end Christ came along the roadways of 
the world and whitened our lives, and taught us that 
a man had to be clean as a woman in morals, yet in 
such an era this man Cicero was clean. He was a 
beautiful father. He loved his son and planned for 
him, which was a Roman characteristic. He loved his 
daughter, and when Tullia dies his heartache was poig¬ 
nant enough to make us feel his anguish yet. And 
with all his foibles and all his faults you can not be 
oblivious to Marcus Tullius Cicero. After he had been 
consul, and after he had saved the life of Rome, and 
after he had been banished for sixteen months, he made 
his way back to Rome amid welcome such as seldom 
290 


CICERO AND PAUI.—A CONTRAST. 


comes to man. After he had been given proconsulate 
in Asia he was homesick to see Rome as no man in 
Roman history ever was. And Dante, wandering away 
from Florence, gloomed like a child because he could 
not see his city streets, was blood relative of Cicero, 
who, when he is out of sight of Rome and can not see 
the Palatine, is as homesick as a child. And the patriot 
is bigger than the cosmopolitan; the man who has lost 
the art to love his home and his nation, so that absent 
from his flag and shore, he is not like a child absent from 
his mother, seems to me not big, but little. And this 
man Cicero loved Rome, so that when he was away 
from it he was as homesick as a child, and all he asked 
in his letters to Atticus and to all his friends at home 
was, “Bring me home again.” And all he asked for 
in the proconsulate was that it might be brief. And 
so he came unwillingly but not unwittingly, and landed 
at Ephesus and came to Iconium, came to Lycaonia, 
came to Pamphylia. 

Inquire what was Marcus Tullius Cicero’s business, 
and with what sort of pageant did he come to this 
business Well, let us consider it. He came as a 
representative of Rome. He was a Roman And we 
have read that to be a Roman was greatei than to be 
a king. And to be a proconsul was greater than to 
be an emperor. And this man, when he landed, depu¬ 
tations of citizens of Asia met him on the seas and 
did not misname him, but called him great. And when 
he came to Ephesus the people crowded out to meet 
and fete him. He was a clean ruler, though he made 
much money in his political office, which is a matter 
291 






THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


known in our own day. And he held such cleanness of 
political sway in his proconsular service as was unknown 
in the annals of Rome. But, mark you, he was a king. 
He came not because he would, but because he must. He 
had vanity; but his absence from Rome slew even his 
vanity. And he came, and great deputations saluted 
him. He came not as a man whose life was in jeop¬ 
ardy, but he came as a man who jeopardized the lives 
of many. He came as the exponent of Rome. He 
came to crush out common citizens. He came, and 
his coming was ruthless in the Roman fashion. He 
came for his own aggrandizement, to lord it over the 
East. This was his first consideration. I am not speak¬ 
ing unkindly nor untruly, but simply in the name of 
fact. He came to Asia to rule it, to be its autocrat. 

He came in the second regard to see if, in his brief 
period of office, he might win a triumph. He wanted 
to be “imperator.” Like many another man he had 
been a success in one thing and desired to be a success 
in another thing. He had been allowed to be an orator; 
and now he designed to be a general. He had won a 
kingdom, and it gave him an opportunity to try his 
hand at holding the sword. And his sole desire in 
battle was not so much to aggrandize Rome as to ag¬ 
grandize Cicero. And he told his friends that he 
wanted in Rome to be saluted “Imperator.” And when 
on the fields the ragged voices of his soldiers called, 
“Cicero, imperator,” then those stolid features of Mar¬ 
cus Tullius Cicero broke into a smile and laughed out 
loud. And he turned on some free tribes in Cilicia, 
because nobody made war on him, and he couldn’t 
292 


CICERO AND PAUL—A CONTRAST. 


get to be a general very well fighting nothing; he 
thought to pick on some defenseless citizens in the hills, 
which he did, without much danger, and with large 
success. And he marched to their mountain fastnesses 
and hammered their gates down and broke their walls 
level with the dust, and on a certain Saturnalia day; 
namely a day of festival, sold prisoners into slavery 
and put into the pocket of the Roman world past half 
a million dollars of Roman gold. That was Marcus 
Tullius Cicero’s business. And by and by, having done 
this year of service, he marched down to Cilicia, set 
sail from Tarsus with a happy heart, past Rhodes, 
came over to Athens, and hasted on his way back to 
Rome, a general to have a general’s triumph! Clean 
as this man was regarding money matters, he had the 
superior lust for name, so that if he could win the 
name of imperator of the Roman capital he would 
wipe out freedom from the Cilician mountains. That 
was the career of Marcus Tullius Cicero, in the pro¬ 
consulate of Asia. 

Paul, apostle of Christ, was the widest traveler we 
have note of in the Roman world of his day. The 
points of his journeys are here set down, that we may 
see how prodigal this man was in the simple item of 
travel. He was in or touched in his journeys the fol¬ 
lowing: Jerusalem, Judea, Tyre, Caesarea, Ptolemais, 
Antipatris, Sidon, Damascus, Syria, Antioch, Seleucia, 
Phrygia, Laodicea, Colosse, Pontus, Pamphylia, Pisidia, 
Antioch, Attalia, Perga, Cappadocia, Cilicia, Tarsus, 
Lycia, Myra, Patara, Caria, Miletus, Cnidus, Lydia, 
Thyatira, Sardis, Smyrna, Ephesus, Philadelphia, Tro- 
293 



THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


gylllum, Mysia, Troas, Pergamos, Adramyttium, Asia, 
Ionia, Assos, Cyprus, Salamis, Fair Havens, Galatia, 
Lycaonia, Iconium, Derbe, Lystra, Parthia, Paphlago- 
nia, Bithynia, Thrace, Macedonia, Philippi, Neapolis, 
Apollonia, Berea, Amphipolis, Thessalonica, Corinth, 
Cenchrea, Achaia, Athens, Chios, Samos, Rhodes, 
Clauda, Melita, Lesbos, Mitylene, Rhegium, Puteoli, 
Rome, and it is more than probable he journeyed to 
the western part of Southern Europe and came as his 
heart desired, to Hispania. 

Mark you this man Paul. We know him blessedly 
well. He is the most potent personality in the New 
Testament, always excluding Jesus, who is divine, and 
owns the New Testament as He owns the stars and 
the heavens and the earth. This man was born in 
Tarsus in Cilicia. He lived about half a century after 
Cicero. He was bom a Roman citizen, though he was 
a Jew by blood. Bora at Tarsus, lived there, went 
to Jerusalem, was educated there, became a Pharisee 
of the Pharisees; heard about the sect called Chris¬ 
tians, was angered by them, was no half-way man, was 
no namby-pamby man, was no mugwump, went to slay 
the Christians, met Christ, saw Him once, marveled at 
Him much; loved Him, so that afterward he gladdened 
to say, ‘T am a bond servant of Christ;” and in the 
event died for Him. 

And we have thought to track this man Paul and 
track this man Cicero; both marched through Cilicia; 
both marched through Syria, through Tarsus, through 
Pamphylia, through Cappadocia, through Galatia, 
through Lycaonia, and this man Cicero is marching for 
294 


CICERO AND PAUL—A CONTRAST. 


the one purpose of aggrandizing Marcus Tullius Cicero; 
and this man Paul, who used to be Saul of Tarsus, 
hath on his breast, and his arms hugged around it, 
and the blood streaming down it, a Cross! And as 
he marches through Syria and through Cilicia, and 
as he goes to his own home town. Tarsus, and as he 
goes to Galatia through the mountain passes, as he 
falls among robbers, they always see a lonely soldier, 
not with a sword, but with a cross. And when the 
day is dark and dull toward night, he stands upon the 
fringe of the town and holds the cross on high and 
calls: “Behold the Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ.” 
And I can hear him yet. And when he goes down the 
lonely highways where the robbers linger and wait for 
him, he smites them with the Cross and calls, “The 
Cross of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.” And 
as he marches along the mountain fastnesses, and as 
he goes solitary along the starry night, he goes hold¬ 
ing up the Cross, and men can hear him giving halle¬ 
lujahs and singing psalms far away, can hear his call¬ 
ing, “The Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ.” 

And so we witness the one man, Marcus Tullius 
Cicero, went to stand for Marcus Tullius Cicero; and 
the man, Paul, went to stand for Christ. And the 
one went to enrich himself and to glorify himself, and 
the other went to impoverish himself and to glorify 
Christ. And one man went for the ego and the glory 
of self, and the other man went to slay the ego and 
to eradicate self. And he is going into Ephesus. Did 
you mark that? This Paul had a voice, and for years 
went to and fro preaching the gospel. And he went 
295 


THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 

to the town of Ephesus and preached there day and 
night with tears, and visited from house to house. And 
I think I will say, what is in my knowledge to say, 
and what is in my heart to say, that the parting of 
Paul from the brethren out beyond Ephesus is one 
of the most heart-breaking episodes that ever spilled 
out of the breaking heart of literature. Paul went 
to Ephesus for the glory of himself? No. Is he met 
by great companies and great welcome? No. Is he 
‘greeted by applauding throngs? No. He goes into 
the city alone, or with one man. He goes into the 
city not to be supported by public bounty, but earns 
his board by tentmaking, and his fingers are often 
bleeding from the wiry fibers. Paul, what do you do? 
“Earn my board, that I may live my strength for 
Him.” And you shall see him at Lycaonia. If you 
will read in the narratives of Cicero you will read that 
he marched through Iconium, but if you will read in 
the narratives of Paul you will find that his footprints 
are miarked with blood, because he was stoned in a 
certain city and dragged out for dead, but after awhile 
he got up and walked back into the city that stoned 
him and left him for dead. And he is going about 
talking about another, whose name is Christ. He is 
working for his board that he may tell the name of 
Christ. He is working his own passage that he may 
tell the name of Christ; he is on shipboard, that he 
may preach Christ. And wheresoever he • pilgrimed, 
Paul and Another came to town. Wheresoever Paul 
pilgrimed two men came to town, Jesus Christ of Naz¬ 
areth, and Paul, the apostle of Christ. And a voice 
296 


CICERO AND PAUL—A CONTRAST. 


said, “Christ,” and the voice was Paul’s. And people 
once came to worship Paul, and he said, as he tore his 
garments, “God forbid! Worship Christ.” Not as 
a random arrow from a random bow, this represents 
the difference between the dispensation of Rome and 
the dispensation of Christ, heathenism and its civili¬ 
zation, Christianity and its civilization. The business 
of the one, the aggrandizement of itself; the business 
of the other, to demolish self and to love and glorify 
Christ. 

And Paul was at Tarsus, his birthplace. And Paul 
was at Syria. And he went through Asia. He knew 
Asia Minor better than any governor. He walked 
most of the way, whether he had money or not. And 
finall}^, when his heart hungered to come to Rome, not 
for his own glory, but because his heart ached to name 
Christ in Rome, he appealed to Caesar. Not that he 
cared for Caesar’s office or for the Roman capital, to 
walk through crowded streets crowded with history, but 
because he wanted to bear his cross and wear it there. 
He came to Athens, came on a voyage, and what he 
did in Athens was to march up Mars’ Hill, and say, 
“Him whom ye ignorantly worship. Him declare I 
unto you.” And he came to Rome and was glad as 
a lover who comes near to the woman he loves, though 
when they brought him he was in chains, and he had 
been shipwrecked, and the garments he wore were so 
stained and sea-soaked, and chains dangled from his 
wrists. And he came up to Rome, not as Marcus Tul¬ 
lius Cicero did, with great eclat and callings of the 
throng, but he came with his chains to the prison. 
297 



THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


And he was so glad, that you may hear him calling 
aloud with rapture, “Home, home, home.” And they 
thought he said, “Rome, Rome, Rome.” And he was 
a messenger who knew there was a short cut to the 
kingdom of God; and in that prison he was to lift 
up the cross and say, “The Cross of our Lord Jesus 
Christ.” He was in his own hired house chained to 
a Roman soldier. They by and by put him in the 
Mamertine prison. The prison cell was damp and dark. 
The windows were only slits with bars across. And 
he sang songs, not as interludes or preludes, but all 
the time kept singing, “His name is Christ, His name 
is Christ.” And once men came and said, “Who are 
you?” And he said, “Paul, a bond servant of Jesus 
Christ.” And one day they fetched him out, and he 
came with steps that leaped and ran as a man running 
to the triumph awaiting him, for a crown, and he ran 
toward the hill, and he leaned his head, and they smote 
him hard and a chain dangled from a dying man’s 
wrist, but on the dead man’s face there was a smile 
of rapture. 

Down near the coast line of Italy, borne of slaves, 
is Marcus Tullius Cicero; and he is fleeing for his 
life. And behind him come clamoring the horsemen 
of maddened, drunken Mark Antony, who has for¬ 
gotten much, but not his lust for Cicero’s blood; and 
at last Cicero leans his head out of the carriage and 
sees the sword and says, “Strike!” It was the man¬ 
liest word he ever drew breath to utter. But Paul 
was not caught fleeing from his enemies, but toward 
them; and when he stood upon the hill about to die, 
298 


CICERO AND PAUL—A CONTRAST. 


he held up the cross and said, ‘‘The Cross of our 
Lord Jesus Christ.” And the men said, “Be still, be 
still!” And he said, “Men, you know not what words 
you utter. I glory in the cross of my Lord and Sav¬ 
ior Jesus Christ, whose bond servant I am. Amen.” 
And he leans his head to the ax. 

Cicero lived for self and self-applause and self- 
enrichment and self-service. And Paul lived not for 
himself, but unto God. Good night, Marcus Tullius 
Cicero. Ah, Brother Paul! Good morning 1 


299 




The Debt of the Republic to the 
Preacher. 

This chapter purposes to be a brief summarization 
of services rendered to the United States of Amer¬ 
ica by ministers of Christ. The subject is scarcely 
broached; and its discussion will, in any case, open a 
gate to a suggestive field. In this country. Church 
and State are absolutely distinct. The State has its 
function, the Church its function. The State is to pro¬ 
tect the Church; the Church is to drain the malarias 
from the social swamps so as to make the State’s con¬ 
tinuance a possibility. The Church of Christ is much 
more vital to the State than the State to the Church. 
The United States collected a ninety-one-thousand-dol- 
lar indemnity from Turkey for outrages perpetrated 
against missionary interests. As relates to the Church 
this is the legitimate office of government. When a 
Church wants more than protection it is become a beg¬ 
gar. In England, however, where Church and State 
are commingled, the House of Lords being composed 
of hereditary nobility and the higher ecclesiastics, credit 
to the clergy has been a habit; whereas with us in 
America the total separation of Church and State has 
made the shallow politician and secular writer suppose 
themselves the chief functionaries of the Republic, and 
has lent them patronizing airs toward the preacher of 
300 


DEBT OF REPUBLIC TO PREACHER. 


the gospel. For this reason the discussion of the clergy 
contribution to American civilization may be both timely 
and necessary. The geographical limit of this inquiry 
is the United States; the time is from the founding 
of the colonies until now. The personnel shall be 
preachers, irrespective of denomination, who have made 
contributions of any sort to the well-being of our na¬ 
tive land. 

Morality is the main condition of national lon¬ 
gevity. This we take to be so evident to students of 
history as to need no argument. Immorality sins 
against the State as against the individual. What 
makes for immorality makes for national anaemia and 
ultimate death. What makes for morals makes for 
health and continued life and vigor. Morals do not, 
historically stated, propagate themselves. Except a re¬ 
ligion be behind a moral inculcation, that inculcation 
is operatively insufficient. Socratic, Platonic, Stoic, 
Senecan, or Aurelian morals have scarcely made a rip¬ 
ple on the surface of history or mankind; but the 
morals of Confucius and Mohammed and Buddha have 
been propagated because religions were behind them. 
That the Church of God with its impedimenta of Chris¬ 
tian ethics and its propagandism of holy ardor would 
make for the health of the State, is therefore apparent. 
The clergy of a city are of more economic and police 
value than all the police force or city employees. Every 
preacher walks his beat indefatigably, policing a ter¬ 
ritory for the city’s good and the State’s weal. Every 
child brought under the salutary influence of the Chris¬ 
tian Church, in so far as the Christian influence has 
301 


THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


had its honest, operative effect on the life, has been 
a contribution to citizenship. Christianity makes good 
citizens. A Christian costs the State nothing. The 
gambler, saloonist, harlot, criminal of any order are 
constant boarders at the public tables. Every Sun¬ 
day-school and mission and Church makes against vice, 
as vice makes against the public plenty as well as 
against public health. Vice is to be likened to the 
lean kine Pharaoh saw in his vision, which consumed 
the fat kine. No statesman can estimate the police 
power of the Church, and beyond that the power for 
constructive citizenship the Christian inculcation affords. 
Because it is abiding, invisible, and voiceless, like grav¬ 
itation, the surface economist fails to notice its prodi¬ 
gious force and efficiency. Now, the minister being 
such as he is, the leader in the Church, the mouthpiece 
of its purpose, and guardian of public health, must 
be accredited a man’s part in whatsoever work of moral 
uplift and benefit a fair estimate may concede to the 
Church. Now, this suggestion is not included in the 
argument, but is placed as a sort of concrete basis 
on which the argument rests; and no one acquainted 
with the incalculable repressive and stimulative power 
of Christianity can for a moment gainsay the validity 
and force of this preliminary contention. 

First, in the discussion, we must recall that the 
United States was settled by religious colonies, and 
in a day when the parson (meaning, as Lowell has 
told us, the chief person) was a sort of citadel figure 
in a community. Huguenots under Coligny settled 
the Carolinas; the Puritans, Massachusetts; the Bap- 
302 


DEBT OF REPUBLIC TO PREACHER. 


tists, Rhode Island; the Quakers, Pennsylvania; the 
American Puritan emigrated to Connecticut; Gustavus 
Adolphus and Oxenstiern founded New Sweden; the 
Dutch Protestant founded New Amsterdam; philan¬ 
thropist Oglethorpe founded Georgia; Roman Catho¬ 
lic Lord Baltimore founded Maryland. In Virginia, 
which was at the first a settlement of decayed gentry 
and refuse from the jails of England, the Church was 
an afterthought, and the clergy comparatively incon¬ 
sequential and lacking in popularity, as witnesses the 
legal case in which Patrick Henry defeated them, in 
their just attempt to collect what was but their legit¬ 
imate salary, when the community wished to pay them 
in fiat money. Roger Williams, preacher, founded 
Rhode Island. William Penn, preacher, was the father 
of the Friends’ Communion in America; Oglethorpe 
brought with him from England John Wesley as 
evangelist to America. John Robinson at Delft had 
more to do with the launching of the Mayflower and 
the emigration of the Pilgrims and the liberty their 
province fathered than any man, or than all men. That 
is to say, John Robinson, preacher of the Puritan 
Church, was more influential in shaping the subsequent 
history of America than Carver, or Winthrop, or any 
other Puritan governor. America will always be in 
his debt. He, to use a figure, helped to freight the 
Mayflower, and then pushed it from the shore. His 
sermon on the embarkation of the Pilgrim fathers is 
lit with a glow of statesmanship and prophecy. Thus 
the clergyman was in the veins of American life. He 
not injected. He was and will always remain a 
303 


was 



THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


constituent of the blood. Diagnose his case, and rea¬ 
sons for this efficaciousness will become apparent. 

The preacher is elevated in type and tone. The 
Shy Pilot might serve as the biography of thousands of 
preachers whose names only an obituary list makes 
note of. This sky pilot within society elevates it, is 
larger, serener, than it is, and goes heavenward with 
his mountain village in his two hands. The “Rabbi” 
in “Kate Carnegie” is silhouette of a clean, strong, 
manly, unselfish lover of the Christ as minister of 
Christ. And these characters are fictions in name only. 
They are true as truth. From them may be inferred 
the characteristics of the minister as he develops in 
society. He is a cultivated gentleman. There are ex¬ 
ceptions; but this contention is that he is on a par 
with the community in which he is, and beyond it. 
Emerson, in The American Scholar, speaking of the 
clergy, says, “Who are always, more universally than 
any other class, the scholars of the day.” 

The preacher is intelligent and makes for intelli¬ 
gence himself as interpreter in the community in which 
he is and its leader. Men do not long listen to their 
inferiors. He is usually a gentleman. He has a wide 
fund of knowledge, and is frequently a wide traveler. 
He is well read; quoting from our friend Keats, of 
blessed memory, much has he 

‘^traveled in the realms of gold, 

And many goodly states and kingdoms seen.** 

So it comes to pass that the preacher distills in¬ 
spiration. He brings knowledge from remoter points 
304 


DEBT OF REPUBLIC TO PREACHER. 


of the intellectual horizon than any living man. J. 
G. Holland, in his letter to Benjamin Franklin Jones 
(in the Tit comb Letters), on his habitual non-attend¬ 
ance at Church, says in effect that, though his asso¬ 
ciation had for many years been with leaders in the 
literary world, he had received intellectual life and 
stimulation from no class of people in such a degree 
as from ministers. A testimonial coming from such 
a man, whose intercourse was with the best literary 
intelligence of his time, and his time recent, is weighty 
and worth pondering. The newspaper disseminates all 
sorts of information, legitimate and illegitimate, with 
entire impartiality. Information the newspaper gives, 
but frequently fails to give illumination. The preacher 
goes to the best quarters and brings back the best 
news from the regions visited. He hobnobs with the 
largest and best life of the world, and is in sympa¬ 
thetic touch with every holy and laudable appetency 
of the soul, and therefore gives expression to the finer 
thought and fancy and fact of his era. He is a 
preacher of righteousness, but as well a preacher of 
rightness, morality, intelligence, culture, courtesy, wom¬ 
anliness, manliness, patriotism. His field is the world 
of larger aspirations, purpose, control; and he speaks 
of this world as of it, so that his words are a manifest 
philanthropy. He stands for absolute morality. He 
is against the sweating system, is in favor of social 
equality, and of all public servants knows most of the 
extremes of society—inasmuch as every day his line of 
cleavage is through all the social strata. In the morn¬ 
ing he may pray with a dying pauper; in the after- 
20 305 


THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


noon preach to male prisoners, a little later to female 
prisoners, and in the evening officiate at the marriage 
of the millionaire’s daughter. His knowledge of so¬ 
ciety is thrust on him; he is in the nature of his in¬ 
formation and vocation a unifier of society. Then he 
is under bonds to goodness: “Whatsoever things are 
pure” appeal to him as spring appeals to the poet. 
He is allied to all good things. He is humanitarian, 
friend of birds and dray horse and ill-used child, and 
homeless and forsaken woman, or outcast man; he is 
labor’s friend, friend of and pleader for intelligence. 
He is opposed to coarseness and lewdness and intem¬ 
perance, the foe to coarse and unmoral and immoral 
literature and theaters and lewd spectacles generally. 
His attitude is determined and unwavering. He is the 
known foe of intemperance and the liquor traffic root 
and branch. The polestar will change its place among 
the stars sooner than the preacher will change attitude 
against evil. That such championship of society’s 
right must tell for society’s good goes without argu¬ 
ment. 

The Clergyman as Father of a Family. God 
has not shown a better place to be born or nurtured 
than under a manse roof. The preacher is a contri¬ 
bution to the public wealth in his children. No man 
is better qualified to rear citizens than he. Virtue, so¬ 
briety, godliness, prayer. Scripture reading, the incense 
of a grateful spirit, the air of culture and refinement 
which pervades the home, the presence of a pure and 
gracious woman, the neighborliness of books—^these, and 
many concomitants of the same sort, all conspire to give 
306 


DEBT OF REPUBLIC TO PREACHER. 


a preacher’s child a supreme fighting chance in the 
world. The Roman Catholic celibate priest herein sins 
against the common good. A minister deserves to have 
a family, and in failing here fails in public service. 
Luther was right not simply in Scripture theory, but 
in actual practice; and if from this happy home circle 
of the ex-priest and the ex-nun had come no other voice 
than Luther’s Christmas hymn, written for his little 
children, that home had been forever sanctified. Preach¬ 
ers’ children as a class make high-grade contributions 
to the social, intellectual, and moral world. At this 
point it is discreet to recall how settled a friend the 
preacher is to culture, and with what uniformity the 
preacher’s family is accorded a college training, though 
his circumstances are of the poorest. The preacher’s 
son and daughter are much in evidence in college cata¬ 
logues. Whatever sacrifice may have been made at 
home, the child is apt to be in the college; and so a 
cultivated youth is what proceeds, as a rule, from the 
parson’s doors into American life. Among the repre¬ 
sentative members of every business and social com¬ 
munity will be the son and daughter of the preacher 
household. As illustrative of this, notice that Peter 
Stuyvesant, ablest of the Dutch governors of New Am¬ 
sterdam, was a preacher’s son; that Adoniram Judson, 
greatest of American missionaries, save William Tay¬ 
lor, was a preacher’s son; that Jonathan Edwards was 
a preacher’s son; that Timothy Dwight, who turned 
American youth away from French atheism, was a de¬ 
scendant of Jonathan Edwards; that the second Tim¬ 
othy Dwight, a renowned college president, was a 
307 



THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


preacher’s son; that Henry Clay, the great compro¬ 
miser, was the same; that Fitz-Greene Halleck, the poet, 
was descended from John Eliot, ‘^Apostle to the In¬ 
dians;” that Samuel F. B. Morse, inventor of teleg¬ 
raphy, and in consequence one of the greatest bene¬ 
factors of the race, was a preacher’s son; and that Sen¬ 
ators Dolliver and Bristow are the sons of Methodist 
clergymen. Presidents Arthur and Cleveland were 
preachers’ sons; Elizabeth Stuart Phelps was a preach¬ 
er’s daughter; the Field family—including Henry M. 
Field, the editor; David Dudley and Stephen J. Field, 
lawyers, and Cyrus W. Field, of Atlantic Cable fame— 
were a preacher’s sons. So were Holmes and Lowell, 
poets whose names are perfume sweet. The poets Fred¬ 
erick Lawrence Knowles and Richard Watson Gilder, so 
lately deceased, were Methodist preachers’ sons. Pres¬ 
ident Woodrow Wilson, of Princeton, is son of a min¬ 
ister. Louis Agassiz was a preacher’s son. Harriet 
Beecher Stowe and Henry Ward Beecher were daugh¬ 
ter and son of a preacher household. But why go far¬ 
ther.? The Beecher household is proof positive of the 
amazing contribution the clergy make through their 
children to the public benefit. 

Preachers as Founders of Colleges. The Pu¬ 
ritan, among whom the preacher was puissant, gave 
America the public school; and preachers are friends 
of education as a whole, as is evidenced by their pa¬ 
ternal relation to American colleges. They were among 
the chief founders, and are among their chief support¬ 
ers. Denominational colleges have everywhere been 
pensioners on the preacher. Harvard, first coUege in 
308 


DEBT OF REPUBLIC TO PREACHER. 


the New World, was founded by Rev. John Harvard, 
who gave half his estate and all his library for such 
founding; it was likewise indebted to Bishop Berkeley 
for a rare set of the Greek and Latin classics. Yale was 
founded by ten ministers, who “each contributed a gift 
of books,” Bishop Berkeley being also among its ear¬ 
liest of patrons. Bishops Coke and Asbury founded 
the earliest of Methodist institutions, namely, Cokes- 
bury College. Baker University, the first college 
founded in the Territory of Kansas, was organized by 
preachers and named after Bishop Baker, Indeed, the 
multitude of denominational colleges is the creation of 
preachers who believe to the point of enthusiasm in 
Christian culture. Dr. Leonard Wood was founder of 
Andover Theological Seminary; Drs. Dempster, Bar- 
rows, and Bishop Baker were founders of Garrett Bib¬ 
lical Institute; Rev. Thomas Kirkland founded Hamil¬ 
ton College; Rev. John Livingston founded Rutgers 
College; the Goucher College at Baltimore, which now 
takes rank with the leading woman’s colleges of Amer¬ 
ica or the world, is virtually the creation of Dr. 
Goucher; Dartmouth College was founded by Rev. Ele- 
azar Wheelock, pioneer of Christian Education for In¬ 
dians in New England. 

Preachers as Coeeege Presidents. For many 
years, and until very recently, college presidents have 
i been largely selected from the ranks of clergymen. 
This was under that conception of a college president 
which held him to be an educator and a man who would 
be prodigiously forceful in shaping the youthful life 
passing under his influence. He was pre-eminently a 
309 



THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 

shaper of mind, ambitions, ideals, and character. Just 
now the chief aim in securing a college president seems 
to be to lay hands on a money-getter. He must be 
magical in getting endowment. He has little or noth¬ 
ing to do with the student community over which he 
presides. He is, in other words, a college agent, spelled 
in a more impressive fashion. This changed ideal of 
a college president is an experiment, and one that does 
not savor of scholarship or college ideals. Senator In¬ 
galls once said to the writer that of all men who had 
controlling influence on his life. President Mark Hop¬ 
kins was easily chief, which utterance may stand for 
multitudes of experiences. When youth is young an 
ounce of influence is more potent than a ton might be 
later, and when a man of moral and mental might is 
in the president’s chair the good resulting to those 
whose lives he touches is past computation. In a word, 
for a multitude of years, as trainers of youth as col¬ 
lege presidents, preachers have been almost monopo¬ 
lists. At the head of this list of beneficent forces in 
American civilization, though chronologically he does 
not come so early, I place Rev. Francis Allison, because 
he was a pre-Revolution educator of distinction, under 
whose tuition were Charles Thomson, secretary of the 
Continental Congress during the Revolutionary period, 
and Francis Hopkinson, one of the signers of the Dec¬ 
laration of Independence. Harvard had Increase Ma¬ 
ther as one of its great presidents, and Edward Ever¬ 
ett, who was a preacher. Yale had Ezra Stiles, of 
precious memory; Timothy Dwight, of the Revolution¬ 
ary period; Theodore Woolsey, Noah Porter, and again 
310 


DEBT OF REPUBLIC TO PREACHER. 


a Timothy Dwight. Princeton glories in such presi¬ 
dents as Jonathan Edwards; Dr. Witherspoon, patriot, 
member of Congress, and signer of the Declaration of 
Independence; and Dr. McCosh, metaphysician and mas¬ 
ter of men. Williams had Mark Hopkins, who himself 
is a catalogue of great moral, intellectual, and spiritual 
force. Union College had Eliphalet Nott, who for 
sixty-two years—^the longest college presidency in the 
history of America or the world—was at the head of the 
institution. Brown University had Francis Wayland; 
Dickinson College, John Price Durbin; Wesleyan (the 
oldest living college of Methodism) has had Wilbur 
Fisk, Stephen Olin, Dr. Bangs, founder of the Meth¬ 
odist Missionary Society, while from the presidency of 
this college Dr. Foss passed into the episcopacy. Rev. 
Thomas Allen was the first president of Allegheny Col¬ 
lege. Henry B. Bascom, the brilliant Southern orator, 
was president of Madison College. E. O. Haven was 
president of Syracuse University; Dr. Cummings of 
Northwestern. Matthew Simpson, Thomas Bowman, 
Dr. John P. D. John, Dr. Gobin, and Edwin H. Hughes 
were presidents of Asbury, now DePauw. Now, this 
list, not exhaustive, is yet sufficient to show the elevat¬ 
ing effect on the Republic of such a host of choice 
spirits dealing with the plastic mind, and is clearly 
beyond computation. 

The Preacher as a Literary Man. The preacher 
has ever been a man of letters. Making sermons is as 
clearly creative as making poems. The preacher is ca¬ 
pable of expressing thought with clearness, force, and 
eloquence, so that for him to become an author is a 
311 


THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 

natural sequence. The clergy has produced some dis¬ 
tinguished editors, such as, among Methodists, Abel 
Stevens, Nathan Bangs, John P. Durbin, Edward 
Thomson, Daniel Curry, Gilbert Haven, D. D. Whe- 
don, and William V. Kelley. In other denominations 
have been such men as Irenseus Prime, Lyman Abbott, 
Henry Ward Beecher, Washington Gladden, and the 
late gifted William C. Gray. Among writers of books 
enroll these names as illustrative of the preacher’s prev¬ 
alence and potency in the field of letters: Abiel Holmes, 
author of Annals of America (published in 1805), and 
pronounced by Lossing to be “as a work of reference 
one of the most valuable publications ever issued from 
the press;” Rev. Timothy Flint, author of Recollec¬ 
tions of Ten Years^ Residence and Travel in the Mis- 
sissippi Valley, a book which received much attention 
in its day, afterward became editor of the Knickerbocker 
Magazine; Jared Sparks, who edited The Diplomatic 
Correspondence of the Revolution and wrote the Life 
of Washington and the Life of Franklin, and in 1830 
established the American Almanac, and edited the Li¬ 
brary of American Biography; Rev. Jedediah Morse 
(father of Morse, the inventor of telegraphy) was the 
first American to issue a geography; Jacob and John 
S. C. Abbott, celebrated as writers for young people; 
John McClintock and James Strong, who in editing 
the Cyclopcedia of Biblical, Ecclesiastical, and Theo¬ 
logical Literature rendered a service to the Christianity 
of the entire world; Jonathan Edwards, the theologian 
and metaphysician; D. D. Whedon, editor and meta¬ 
physician, whose book on the Freedom of the Will ren- 
312 


DEBT OF REPUBLIC TO PREACHER. 


dered his name immortal; Samuel Longfellow, himself 
a poet, though less distinguished than his brother; Tim¬ 
othy Dwight, known to every lover of the hymns of 
the Church as the author of “I love Thy kingdom. 
Lord;” Thomas Starr King, who has kept the summer 
light abundant on the White Hills by his book, Wan¬ 
derings among them; Samuel F. Smith, author of “My 
country, ’t is of thee;” President Hopkins, writer of 
books on moral philosophy and religion; President Mc- 
Cosh, voluminous author, whose book on the Divine Gov¬ 
ernment thoughtful Christians can not afford to miss 
in their reading; Theodore Parker, aberrant, pugilistic, 
yet, as all must confess, brilliant; William Ellery Chan- 
ning, chaste in life and thought and expression, a poet 
of no mean repute; Professor David Swing, whose ser¬ 
mons were less sermons than aesthetic essays; Dr. Abel 
Stevens, the historian of his denomination; Jones Very, 
a poet of twilights, some of whose sonnets rank first 
in any anthology of American sonnets; Ray Palmer, 
who has impressed himself upon the world of gos¬ 
pel singers; Phillips Brooks, who held himself with 
solitary fidelity to his preaching craft, yet wrote 
“O, little town of Bethlehem,” and whose sermons have 
the literary instinct; Henry van Dyke, late minister of 
the Brick Church, author of Fisherman's Luck, which 
contains some of the daintiest human touches which 
have of recent years spilled tears upon the cheek, and 
l^he Other Wise Man, which is doubtless destined to 
be a classic, like Rah and His Friends or Fishin' Jimmy, 
and whose dainty volume. The Poetry of Tennyson, the 
poet himself thought was the noblest interpretation of 
313 



THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


The Idyls of the Kmg that had been made during his 
life; Newell Dwight Hillis, whose books are always help¬ 
ful; Edward Everett Hale, whose brochure, A Man 
Without a Country^ had in the days of our national 
peril a beautiful and effective usefulness; Edward Eg¬ 
gleston, whose American novels help set the pace for de¬ 
lineation of character indigenous to our American life; 
Henry Ward Beecher, whose sermons are substantial 
contributions to literature and are of marvelous range 
and expression, so that if Robertson of Brighton is to 
be placed among the literary worthies of England, 
Henry Ward Beecher must be listed with Hawthorne 
and Motley and Cable and Howells as exponents of the 
literary conception of America. Distinguished clergy¬ 
men, and multitudes of those not distinguished, have 
spoken through a book to the thought of the country. 
Shedd and Phelps and Hodge and Raymond and Barnes, 
and legions more, have written standard books. Preach¬ 
ers have made large contributions to the literary thought 
of their generation. Mention has been made here only 
of some who have wrought distinctively in the field of 
literature apart from theology, which was their native 
province. 

pREACHEES AS Inspirers. The preacher more than 
most men has been fertile in suggestion to others in 
things to be accomplished, as Cotton Mather (of un- 
happy witchcraft fame) suggested to Dr. Boylston the 
feasibility of introduction to Boston, and so to Amer¬ 
ica, of inoculation for smallpox. This power of sug¬ 
gestion is to be considered as among the finest powers 
of the soul. To make others think, or dream, or aspire, 
314 


DEBT OF REPUBLIC TO PREACHER. 


or do, is genius. Dr. Peter Akers preached a sermon 
to which Abraham Lincoln listened, and which led that 
remote and yet neighborly spirit to cherish the dream 
of annihilating slavery; and Dr. Gunsaulus only a few 
years ago preached a sermon which inspired his parish¬ 
ioner, Philip D. Armour, to build the Armour Institute, 
of Chicago. Such instances are not infrequent, but 
might be multiplied if space permitted. Bishop Simp¬ 
son pronounced the funeral eulogy over Lincoln; while 
Bishop Andrews performed the like service for Mc¬ 
Kinley. 

Preachers Who Have in a General Way Con¬ 
tributed TO THE Nation’s Life. This list shall con¬ 
tain names sufficient to afford a basis of suggestion for 
multitudes of the sort not here mentioned. Rev. Jesse 
Glover presented a font of type to Harvard in 1638, 
and induced Stephen Day to go to America, where he 
issued the first book printed in America, namely, the 
Psalms m Meter, William Brewster, the first minister 
of the Puritans of Plymouth Rock, whose house in Eng¬ 
land had been the “meeting-house” of John Robinson’s 
Separatists prior to their emigration to Holland, set 
sail with the Mayflower company and was their min¬ 
ister for many years. John Eliot, “Apostle to the In¬ 
dians,” educated at Cambridge, came to America in 
1631, and being moved with compassion toward the 
twenty tribes of Indians known to the English settle¬ 
ment, began preaching in Newton in 1646, and trans¬ 
lated the New Testament into the Indian tongue in 
1661. At the age of eighty, when too old to continue 
his Indian missionary efforts, he taught the colored 
315 


THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 

servants who could be gotten to him, and entered into 
heaven, saying, “Welcome, joy.” Roger Williams, 
apostle of religious liberty, an Oxford man, intensely 
intolerant in his time, but who became tolerant, and 
settled for religious liberty what the Dutch called 
“Roodt Eylandt,” establishing therein a purely demo¬ 
cratic government, founded a state where “freedom to 
worship God according to the dictates of the individual 
conscience was made an organic law.” William Penn 
was a Quaker preacher, and author of a colonial policy 
such as places him among the best colonizing agencies 
in the New World. Thomas Hooker, “The Light of 
the Western Churches,” became the leading spirit in 
colonizing the Connecticut valley. Rev. Eleazar Whee- 
lock, born in Connecticut and educated in Yale, founded 
the first school for the Christian education of Indian 
youths in New England in 1743. Rev. Increase Ma¬ 
ther, father of Cotton Mather, was president of Har¬ 
vard College, and was the diplomat through whose skill¬ 
ful offices New England, after the expulsion of Gov¬ 
ernor Andros, secured the celebrated charter of 1691, 
and was given a vote of thanks by the first Legislature 
assembled thereafter; he was opposed to the persecu¬ 
tion of witches, and his opposition was finally effective 
in the suppressal of such proceedings; he was the first 
man in America to receive the degree of Doctor of Di¬ 
vinity. Rev. Ezra Stiles was in 1777 elected president 
of Yale College, and was allowed to be one of the most 
brilliant occupants of that famous chair. John Car- 
roll, Roman Catholic Bishop of Baltimore, when all 
America was in that diocese, was during the Revolution- 
316 


DEBT OF REPUBLIC TO PREACHER. 


ary period a proved patriot. William White, second 
Episcopal Bishop in America, and inaugurator of the 
Episcopal Church in America, was presiding bishop 
of his Church when his bishopric included America. 
Rev. Samuel Kirkland, founder of Hamilton College, 
was for forty years a missionary among tlie Indians, 
and among the most potent factors for good in negoti¬ 
ating treaties with the Indians^ David Brainerd, emi¬ 
nent Indian missionary, and a saint whose writings are 
among the standards of devotional reading, was a 
friend of Jonathan Edwards, at whose house hp died at 
the age of twenty-nine. Jeremy Belknap, about 1798, 
wrote a carefully prepared “American Biography.” 
Rev. Mason L. Weems was Bible agent among the 
colonies in those early days, and wrote lives of Penn, 
Franklin, Marion, and that life of Washington which 
served so notable a purpose in shaping the life of Abra¬ 
ham Lincoln. Rev. David Jones was associated with 
General Clark, conqueror of the “Territory of the 
Northwest,” and was chaplain of the army when Corn¬ 
wallis surrendered. He was a fighting as well as a 
praying parson, and was chaplain to General Wayne 
when he took command of the Northwestern Territory. 
Rev. William Gordon, an English clergyman, wrote 
what has been characterized as the most faithful and 
impartial history of the American Revolution written 
contemporaneous with it; his book was published in 
England and afterward in New* York. John Wither¬ 
spoon, president of Princeton, helped to frame a re¬ 
publican constitution for New Jersey; he was a member 
of the Continental Congress, a signer of the Declara- 

317 



THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


tion of Independence, and remained a member of Con¬ 
gress till 1782. Ralph H. Livingston, minister of the 
Dutch Church, was a stanch friend of the Government 
during the time of the Revolution. Rev. James Mill- 
nor was one of the founders of the American Tract 
Society and a stanch friend of all eleemosynary insti¬ 
tutions. Adoniram Judson, one of the founders of 
the ‘‘American Board” of Missions, was the first mis¬ 
sionary to go to Burma; he was the first translator of 
the Bible into the Burmese tongue, and made a com¬ 
plete Burmese-English Dictionary, either of which was 
a task of sufficient magnitude to entitle a man to an im¬ 
mortality of thanks. Rev. Thomas H. Gallaudet intro¬ 
duced deaf-mute instruction in the United States, and 
was president of the first deaf-mute society in America; 
this society was located at Hartford, where a monu¬ 
ment has been erected to his memory by contributions 
from the deaf-mutes of the United States, both de¬ 
signer and architect of the monument being deaf-mutes. 
Bishop Francis Asbury, Methodist pioneer bishop, a 
man of sublime devotion to his Master’s business, of 
untiring energy, of superior executive ability, of states¬ 
manlike forecast, helped to change barbarism into civ¬ 
ilization, and, in any fair estimate, of those factors 
which were chief makers of the republic, must be given 
a leading place. Edward Everett entered the ministry 
in 1813, but was chosen the succeeding year to the 
Eliot Chair of Greek in Harvard, was conductor of the 
North American Review, was a member of Congress for 
ten years, was in 1834 governor of Massachusetts, in 
1840 minister to England, in 1845 president of Har- 
318 


DEBT OF REPUBLIC TO PREACHER. 


vard, and in 1852 succeeded Daniel Webster as Secre¬ 
tary of State. 

The Preacher as Patriot. He is a friend and 
advocate of temperance. The Protestant clergy in 
general are in favor of and practice total absti¬ 
nence. They are, as a rule, prohibitionists (I do not 
mean third-party prohibitionists). They are against 
the canteen. Their opposition to the liquor wicked¬ 
ness is known and possesses solidarity. Now, in this 
thing they are patriots, because who is a friend to 
the country with the largest friendship must oppose 
intemperance, which sins against economy, decency, 
home, childhood, womanhood, manhood, municipal 
righteousness, and the enforcement of law. Saloons 
are lawbreakers and breeders of anarchy and housers 
of it. All patriots, and accordingly all preachers, must 
therefore be opposed to intemperance and the liquor 
traffic. To Methodists it is a pleasant memory that 
from the inception of the Methodist Episcopal Church 
it was a settled foe to slavery and intemperance, and in 
the first General Conference, in 1784, composed entirely 
of preachers, pronouncement was made against the in¬ 
iquity of slavery; and Bishops Coke and Asbury were 
the first Abolitionists in America, presenting to Gen¬ 
eral Washington for his signature a petition for free¬ 
ing the slaves. The attitude of the General Confer¬ 
ence toward liquor was aggressively hostile and has 
never varied a hair’s breadth to this hour. As friend 
and civilizer of the Indian the preacher has been among 
the most satisfactory and useful factors. Preachers 
have been his instructors. Theirs has been the most 
319 



THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


generous service, touched with no rust of gold. The 
missionary, from the days of Eliot, through Brainerd, 
to now, has been a civilizer, and a quieter of those tur¬ 
bulent spirits beyond any one’s ability to estimate. 
Prior to Christian ministers’ efforts with the Indians in 
America proper there was Las Casas, the apostle of 
Christianity in Cuba, a friend of the American ab¬ 
origine, a priest of the early Cuban days, who was the 
special pleader for the rights of the Indians as against 
the enslavement by the cruel Spanish; and ministers as 
a class have been hostile to such Chinese exclusion laws 
as are unjust. Henry George, of Single Tax fame, 
promulgated a fine saying just before his death: “I am 
for man;” but the saying was not his invention; it 
was Christ’s. Environments are to be reckoned with in 
shaping the history of the person of the minister, but 
as a rule he is against lynchings and violence. The 
hatchet policy finds scant courtesy at the hand of the 
more thoughtful member of this holy craft. He stands 
for sanity, fair dealing, manly opposition to wrong, 
and for the amendment of codes to fit the moral needs. 
The preacher is in evidence as a spokesman on all sorts 
of occasions. One preacher of prominence in a city 
will, as a rule, render more service on diversified occa¬ 
sions than all the lawyers and other professional men 
in the city. Consider in the late McKinley obsequies 
who, in the main, the orators were. However distin¬ 
guished the other professions in any given community, 
still the preacher is the customary speaker for the great 
occasions, as Dr. Storrs at Brooklyn Bridge. And as 
a patriot the preacher has been, and is, a power for 
320 


DEBT OF REPUBLIC TO PREACHER. 

good. Chaplain McCabe spoke for the Union for forty 
years with his unique power of speech in the familiar 
‘‘Bright Side of Life in Libby Prison.’’ Bishop Fowler 
was a compelling patriotic force in his justly celebrated 
lectures on “Lincoln” and “Grant.” Bishop Simpson, 
in his lectures on “Our Country,” set thousands on fire 
for the Union in the days when the kindling of such 
flame made for the life of the nation. Beecher and 
Bishop Simpson were the two unhesitant voices for the 
Union in the dark days of secession. The attitude of 
these two ministers is a standing rebuke to that of Wen¬ 
dell Phillips, who in the darkest days of the Civil War, 
instead of standing fast by President Lincoln, faulted 
him at every step, and bolted the ticket when he was 
nominated for his second term; and though he returned 
to his allegiancy in time to vote right, his influence 
worked for hurt rather than for help. Simpson and 
Beecher were not so, but with a prodigality of effort sel¬ 
dom seen flamed up and down the land, making for 
faith in country and the triumph of the Union cause. 
Beecher’s British campaign may frankly be considered 
the greatest oratorical battle and victory ever achieved, 
not forgetting the Demosthenic Philippics. Dr. Werter 
R. Davis, a Methodist preacher in Kansas, president of 
Baker University, first president of the first college 
of arts in the Territory of Kansas, was chaplain of 
the Wyandotte Convention, which framed the Free 
State Constitution. He was a member of the first Leg¬ 
islature, a friend of John Brown, of Ossawattomie, and 
of the strange and gifted Jim Lane. During the war 
he was first chaplain and afterward colonel of a com- 
21 321 


THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 

pany of Kansas volunteers, and became commandant of 
Fort Leavenworth. Colonel Allen Buckner was a fight¬ 
ing parson and Methodist preacher from Illinois. He 
was first chaplain and afterward colonel of his regi¬ 
ment, and led that amazing fight of Missionary Ridge, 
when the charge began under nobody’s order, but swept 
on wild with victory. Bishop John H. Vincent, as the 
originator of the International Sunday-school Lessons 
and of the Chautauqua movement, takes rank among 
the educators of the world. Dr. E. H. Chapin was a 
power for good in New York City for thirty years, and 
an antagonist of slavery when antagonism counted, and 
a voice for the Union when voices were as valuable as 
gold. Pere Marquette was a discoverer whose name 
and services are among the happy memories of the 
New World, and his spirit haunts the Great Lakes as 
the shadows haunt the woods. Father Beissonies, who 
recently died in Indianapolis, was a Roman Catholic 
priest sent from France while Indiana was under for¬ 
eign Catholic sway, and belonged to the see of Vin¬ 
cennes. This priest for the past half century went to 
and fro a minister of God, till his name was like “oint¬ 
ment poured forth” and a multitude, irrespective of de¬ 
nomination, rose up to call him blessed. Phillips 
Brooks was such a dynamic force for national and in¬ 
ternational righteousness that he was like the blowing 
of a strong wind from off the sea—^men felt him and 
were glad. The late Dr. Storrs, of Brooklyn, was in 
a day of great men great. He was scholarly, eloquent, 
and prodigious as a force for right doing in Brooklyn 
as was no layman in the city’s life. 

322 


DEBT OF REPUBLIC TO PREACHER. 


This chapter must close. Enou^ has been said to 
make evident the accuracy of the title, “The Debt of 
the Republic to the Preacher,” and enough, it is hoped, 
to give to every preacher a sterling sense of self-respect 
as he takes his place in the leadership of this New World. 


Some Preachers I Have Known. 


The power of the concrete is very great. Despite 
ourselves we will drift backward like a smoke and find 
the day of the lordlier souls to be this world’s yester¬ 
day. Alfred Tennyson’s man of men was man of yes¬ 
terday. King Arthur is well nigh lost along the shad¬ 
ows of the night, or, if a figure of the day, well nigh 
lost among the sea fogs which gather by “Far Tintagil 
by the Cornish Sea.” And we, with the tug of the tide 
toward yesterday upon us, feel (we do not argue it, 
we do not concentrate our knowledge and reduce it to 
the substance to history), we feel the peerless in char¬ 
acter must have been denizens of yesterday. At all 
events, they are not citizens of to-day. Yet, blessed 
be God, here they are, and in this chapter I mean to 
set a group of men myself have known, all pastors in 
one State and of the Conference myself joined on en¬ 
tering the ministry of Christ. I here set them down 
because I loved them and shall love them in the king¬ 
dom of God, but with the wider reason that under our 
eyes almost everywhere are strong souls like them, 
whose lives will keep us attuned to those better things ' 
of which preacher-souls are capable, all days, all wheres. 
These men are not widely known to history: they are 
widely known in heaven. Those things a preacher 
stands for at his manly best these men stood for. They 
324 




SOME PREACHERS I HAVE KNOWN. 


have left a torch alight and have made a path of light 
for my own weary and sometimes vagrant feet. Over 
one of these blessed men, dying, I tried with tremulous 
voice to sing: 

If on a quiet sea 

Toward heaven we calmly sail. 

With grateful hearts, O Lord, to Thee 
We T1 own the favoring gale.” 

And with closed eyes that dear preacher heard, and 
tears dripped down and spilt upon his pillow, for his 
weak hand could not wipe the tears away, though they 
were happy tears. 

* ^ But should the surges rise 
And rest delay to come. 

Blest be the tempest, kind the storm 
Which drives us nearer home. 

Soon shall our doubts and fears 
All yield to Thy control; 

Thy tender mercies shall illume 
The midnight of the soul.” 

So quavered my fitful voice; and an Amen sweeter I 
never heard came from lips that were smiling: and his 
eyes were wide open now. While tears were in them, 
smiles were shining through the tears like sunlight 
through the rain. “Amen.” And only a few nights 
ago I asked his daughter to play this hymn, and she 
said, “I can not play that hymn.” So does love re¬ 
member through the long, sad years. 

And for the clearing our eyes a little, if it shall 
please God, so we shall look about and see the saintly 

325 



THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


and strong souls who neighbor with us and we heed 
them not, this chapter has been set in this preacher- 
book. The Church is richer than it knows. 

GEORGE S. DEARBORN. 

George S. Dearborn is dead. This will be a grief 
to very many hearts. Though he lived among us the 
past eighty years, we were in no wise ready to let him 
go. The best men and women we can never spare. 
However many of them we have, we are penurious with 
them. They are incalculably dear. They belong to 
t||e necessary furnishing of our hearts. We miss them 
if they go as we would miss a mother. To this com¬ 
pany belongs Brother Dearborn. I am grieved to think 
he is gone as if I had been a member of his own family. 
These years now he has been superannuated, living 
quietly with the wife who was dear to him and to whom 
he was so dear. The Conference of which he was such 
an ornament and so honored a member could not feel 
that he was superannuated. There was in him such a 
fund of virility as that it was unthinkable it would 
waste. His sagacity, his integrity, his freshness of 
spirit, his alertness of interest, his fearless frankness, 
his half-taciturn, half-voluble friendliness, his reserve 
of power, his fidelity to honorable interests, his giving 
of time and strength without stint to such causes as de¬ 
manded them, his financial generosity, his fast friend¬ 
ships—are they not all before us as we wipe our eyes 
in thinking of him? I always felt Dr. Dearborn as 
alive. How often he was in my heart and his name 
on my lips! I knew he must die, but did not feel he 
326 


SOME PREACHERS I HAVE KNOWN. 

must. That episode in his career did not appeal to me. 
Life was his belonging. You could not superannuate 
a man like that. He held youth in solution in his blood. 
From time to time, though not seeing him in years, I 
would drop him a line. I like to touch his hand even 
at that distance. That calm of his, that vigor evi' 
denced in voice and look and step, were strengthening. 
They were good to be with and good to think of. They 
refuse to die. In taking stock of Dr. Dearborn’s men¬ 
tal characteristics, the thing most prominent was his 
sanity. You could not well jostle that sane sense of 
his. He kept his head, as we say. Particulars did not 
confuse him. He refused to be confused or lose sense 
of proportion. I think him one of the sanest, best bal¬ 
anced men I ever knew. Those keen eyes saw plenty 
of things, and saw them in relation. Who has seen 
the irrational vagaries of the fanatic must feel the 
immense serviceableness of a man who would not lose 
his head. Though not a man of business, his business 
judgment was so wise as that for many years he was 
the competent president of the Board of Trustees of 
Baker University. He was as regular as the striking 
of the clock. He was not clouded by clouds nor elated 
by sunshine, but deliciously steady. He felt the great¬ 
ness of the interests involved in education. He never 
veered in his fidelity to the institution. No sophistries 
could deceive him. Loyalty was a religious belonging 
of his, and he thought that faithfulness in a God’s 
steward was both worthy and necessary. He was not 
ejaculatory in piety; but those who knew him would 
no more have questioned his religious goodness and the 
327 


THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


depths of his Christian life than they would have ques¬ 
tioned the brightness of the sun. He “fainted not.” 
He was walking up the hill of God, keeping step with 
Him who showed that hill and the way to its crest. 
In all, I think Dr. Dearborn was like the hills from 
which he came. He was a New Englander. These 
steady mountains, granite, inflexible, unafraid of win¬ 
ter, aware of springtime with its green and gladness, 
fronting dawns and sunsets and the shining of the stars, 
at home with solitudes and tempests, set there of God, 
retaining their primal dignity and their impress of the 
Almighty. Those mountains were symbolical of George 
S. Dearborn, only what high hills could not know he 
knew, and what their lips could never utter he could 
speak; for he was “a good minister of Jesus Christ.” 
He has “kept the faith,—henceforth!” 

STEPHEN G. GRIFFIS. 

S. G. Griffis was an unusual character. He was 
a character, and that, in times when all educative in¬ 
fluences unfortunately tend to whittle personality down, 
is a divine asset. There was no twin to Brother Griffis. 
Bishop Walden and he were fast friends and life-long 
friends, but in no wise similar. He was just himself, 
always himself, happily himself. He was one other 
of the fraternity of Kansas preachers, a fraternity 
which in my own knowledge of them was richer in the 
genius of character and manliness than the brethren 
were generally aware of. We live calmly amongst men 
who might be put into brave books and be the bravest 
figure in the book. 


328 


SOME PREACHERS I HAVE KNOWN. 

Brother Griffis I knew at the first of my Kansas 
Conference history. He was, with Richard Wake, my 
examiner for Local Deacon’s orders when I joined Con¬ 
ference at Holton. With what wholesome glee has he 
often rehearsed the “how” of that examination! The 
story was good, but can never be told by any other 
as he told it. Then I was on my first charge. Brother 
Griffis’s successor. He was afterward my father’s pas¬ 
tor. He has been my good friend since first I saw his 
dear face; and I miss my reckoning on holy things if we 
shall not be good friends through all the glad, eternal 
years. He was such a boy, was S. G. Griffis. Blessed 
be the boys who never cease their boyhood! I can not 
think this dear old lad was old. He was so jocund, 
so full of the din of rampant boyhood, so breezy like 
the blowing of wind across the corn, so redolent of the 
life which knows not any sere and yellow leaf. It 
was worth making a journey to hear him blow off steam 
for five minutes. That laugh of his, that loud call 
across a block or so, that twinkle of the eye, that push¬ 
ing of the lock of hair across his bald spot with his 
left hand, that sweet insistency on loving people, that 
ready and abundant wit, that keen sense of the ludi¬ 
crous, that hale “Amen!” of his, which was the man 
keen in sense of love of man and God, that never' 
fading love for youth, that caretaking of Baker Uni¬ 
versity, that love of the Methodist Episcopal Church 
which was no second nature, that awareness of men and 
things and events, that grip on Methodist history, that 
spiritual nature which needed not to talk about religion 
all the time to let men know that he had religion, that 
329 



THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


constant heart of his which never forgot the wife of 
his love, the glee he had in his friends, and the accu¬ 
racy of his human judgments, his faith in man and 
his faith in God, and his glad hope through the abun¬ 
dant mercies of God of making the good climb into 
the hill of the Lord,—ah, me! this catalogue brings 
him before my eyes until I can scarce write for weep¬ 
ing. When shall I see him.^ I must hear that happy, 
hearty voice ring out across the street of gold. I must, 
I will. He had had much sorrow. His children had 
run into the heavenly house. But that only made 
this dear man more the brother. The broken heart had 
made him capable to be very neighborly to all broken 
hearts. I knew he would die, but did not think so. 
He seemed here for always, when on a sudden there 
came a telegram that he was fallen asleep. Sleeping 
or waking, we love him. Wait a little; the morning 
breaketh! 

WERTER RENICK DAVIS. 

A man’s character is his contribution to history 
and humanity. What a man was is larger than what 
he did, for the reason that the one is the product of 
the other. As a person each man counts one in the 
census of the world; as a personality one man may out¬ 
number fourscore. It is this quality of selfness that 
makes a man central and influential. If a man is but 
an echo he is common-place, for echoes multiply. But 
if he be a voice—^men stop, listen, marvel. And in 
the music of human voices and activities the exceptional 
becomes marked and important. It is this we name in- 
330 


SOME PREACHERS I HAVE KNOWN. 


dividuality; and in the possession of this or its lack is 
the difference between the common-place man and him 
whose powers are prodigal as spring. After all, when 
a man leaves us and goes into some far, strange land, 
it is this that lives with us. The what he had and was 
which others are not and have not and so can not 
supply, this it is that leaves us estranged without him. 
The individuality which leaves no successor is the one 
whose loss can never be supplied. 

A mastering yet unassuming personality is a rare 
possession; and it is this which so marked Dr. Davis. 
He who studies his character will find a play of com¬ 
plex forces. This is in a sense true of all. Enlarge 
a man’s capabilities and his sphere, and these facts be¬ 
come emphasized. It was in a high degree true of 
this minister of truth. He was no simple study. His 
life seemed revolving around many centers; and he 
must know him well who would undertake the task 
of rightly estimating his powers of character. 

He lived in a heroic period. There are eras when 
heroisms are at home and make no apology for their 
presence. The Church and State had crises in his day 
which will scarce come again in all the future. When 
armies are to be led, when forces are to be conquered, 
when new civilizations are to be molded, when great 
principles are pitted in a battle to the death, when a 
new land is to be seeded down to ideas of right and 
God, when a system of statescraft, education, and re¬ 
ligion is to be established in a land untouched even 
“since the making of the world,”—then heroisms come 
as the kiss of steel and flint is fire. In this is food 
331 



THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


for suggestive thought. Methodism can never go back 
to its boyhood. A new Kansas can never be opened 
to the world. Such doors are shut. But those who 
were alive and equipped to enter when those doors were 
opened might well play an exceptional part, such as 
we may never reduplicate. Dr. Davis was soldier, edu¬ 
cator, orator, saint. This is a strange combination, 
but such as grew naturally out of what he was and 
when he lived. 

Werter Renick Davis was born in Circleville, Ohio, 
April 1, 1815; died in Baldwin, Kansas, June 22, 1893. 
It will thus be noted that his life was concomitant with 
an illustrious era, one which for commingling of strange 
opportunities and the consequent invigoration of un¬ 
accustomed powers will not in all probability be repro¬ 
duced in all history. At the age of fifteen he entered 
Kenyon College, a school under the control of the 
Episcopal Church, of which his father was a member. 
His mother was a Presbyterian, a woman of strength 
and tenderness, as his father was a man of fine quali¬ 
ties of mind and heart. 

When but fourteen he strayed into a Methodist 
meeting and heard the truths which had set on fire 
the hearts of Luther and Wesley, was convicted, went 
to the mourners’ bench, was converted; and all the cur¬ 
rents of his life set to a new center. To that day this 
man of God always looked with profound delight. It 
was with him a favorite phrase that “paternally he 
was an Episcopalian, maternally a Presbyterian, but a 
Methodist by the grace of God;” and these were not 
words with him: they rather expressed the unchanging 
332 


SOME PREACHERS I HAVE KNOWN. 


conviction of his soul. To him Methodism represented 
so much of divine truth, life, and fervor that it was 
an altar worthy to sanctify many a gift. In that day 
Methodism was a term of derision. To become a Meth¬ 
odist meant what in our time is inconceivable. Then 
there was obloquy connected with it. Specially was this 
true of the attitude of the Episcopal communion. His 
life in Kenyon College became so unsavory through this 
spirit of intolerance that he left without graduating, 
and at the age of nineteen began life as an itinerant 
and entered the goodly fellowship of toil hallowed by 
such great souls as Asbury, Lee, Foster, and Durbin. 

Consider what it means to have bridged three quar¬ 
ters of a century—and such a century! From 1815 to 
1893 is an era which has scarce a parallel in the annals 
of time. He was born before Waterloo sent Napoleon 
to his desert rock to die. He was bom before the close 
of America’s second war for independence. He was 
born prior to the coming of the locomotive and the 
appliances of our modem civilization. 

If a man could have chosen that period of history 
in which to have lived, what so memorable and impor¬ 
tant an epoch could have been selected as the one in 
which this servant of God was permitted to engage in 
holy toil for the redeeming of the world In this three- 
quarter century was such a mighty impulse given to 
progress in every department of human activity as the 
world has never dreamed possible. The political ex¬ 
periment of sixty centuries was but begun. England 
had not yet learned America was free. The territory 
of the Union reached but from the Atlantic to the 
333 


THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


great Desert of the East interior. The Mississippi 
was an untrodden pathway till steam pressed it with 
its burning sandals. In 1835, when this young itin¬ 
erant entered the Ohio Conference, Kansas, the field 
of his most extended labors, was a Sahara to the world. 
There were but eighteen States with a population of 
eight millions. He lived to see forty-four States with 
a population of over sixty millions. At the time of his 
birth there was not a college in Methodism; there were 
but 214,000 members of the Methodism he loved, with 
690 preachers, and three bishops. He lived to see a 
multitude of colleges, 2,292,614 members, 10,750 min¬ 
isters, and 18 bishops. Such civic and ecclesiastical 
growth has no counterpart. 

Two-thirds of the continent were practically un¬ 
occupied by civilization when the young itinerant rode 
into the hill country of Virginia as a Methodist preacher. 
He nor any knew what throes of mighty pain were 
requisite ere the civilization of the future could root 
itself, and before the Magna Charta of our Independ¬ 
ence should speak the truth. For more than fifty years 
this man gave the vigor of an unflagging devotion to 
the spread of the Church and the uplift of the State. 

On June 6, 1835, at Hillsborough, Ohio, this lad 
was licensed to preach by James B. Finley. He was 
but nineteen, a stripling, like young David strayed 
from the sheep cote to the field of war. On August 20, 
1835, he joined the Ohio Conference at Springfield, 
and was appointed to a circuit in Virginia; and from 
that day to the day of his death, was one constant 
activity as a preacher of righteousness, 

334 




SOME PREACHERS I HAVE KNOWN. 


On May 4, 1843, he was married to Miss Minerva 
Russell, a lady of beauty and accomplishment, with 
whom he lived fifty-four years, she being to him a con¬ 
stant inspiration and joy. 

He was, as himself said, “a member of the Cincin¬ 
nati Conference by division, of the Missouri and Kan¬ 
sas and Nebraska Conferences by transfer, and of 
the Kansas Conference by division.” At the time 
of his joining the Ohio Conference it contained such 
men as Morris, Hamline, Thomson, Finley, Trimble, 
Moody, Power, and Strickland, of whom it may be 
justly said, “There were giants in those days;” and 
among such he soon became a man of mark. His was 
a presence which would attract attention anywhere. In 
form tall, slender, erect as a pine; a face of rare in¬ 
telligence, penetrating eyes that looked love and ten¬ 
derness, but could flash like drawn swords when occa¬ 
sion demanded; hair black as the raven’s wing, and for 
the closing thirty years of his life white as almond 
blooms, military in carriage till the day he died. He 
was such a man withal as would attract attention in a 
throng, and attach the faith and love of woman, than 
which no rarer compliment can be paid any man. In 
these days of his early ministry he looked the orator. 
His faculties were all alert. Fire was in his heart, 
tempests in his blood. And the anti-slavery agitation, 
then in its incipiency, demanded his fealty and received 
his hearty allegiance: he at one time being imprisoned 
in Virginia for preaching anti-slavery sentiments. 

Dr. Davis on an important occasion said, “I have 
been in the ministry half the lifetime of the Church.” 
38-5 




THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


That was remarkable, and true as remarkable. His life 
had been contemporaneous with the splendid growth of 
the largest American Protestant ecclesiasticism. In that 
Church which this man loved with an affection per¬ 
ennial and beautiful, for which he labored with a loy¬ 
alty which knew “neither variableness nor shadow of 
turning,” and whose doctrines he both preached and 
lived—in that Church he lived, wrought, and died; and 
by that Church were his services appreciated and him¬ 
self honored. He was a member of three General Con¬ 
ferences, a delegate to the Ecumenical Conference in 
London, and the Centennial Conference in Baltimore. 
Driven from college before graduation, he possessed no 
degree; but Indiana State University recognized his 
scholarship by conferring the A. M. He received the 
M. D. degree from the Cincinnati College of Physi¬ 
cians and Surgeons, and the doctorate of Divinity from 
Asbury University in 1859. 

In Ohio he served the Church eighteen years on 
“Old Union Circuit,” at Dayton, Sandusky, and such 
appointments. Men are now living who remember the 
young man eloquent. Marlay and he were associates 
on the Old Union Circuit. Marlay was noted for 
his reasoning powers; Davis for his oratorical gifts; 
and the people were wont to speak of this rare combi¬ 
nation as “Logic set on fire.” In those days the people 
called Baptists were inclined to be argumentative, and 
young Davis came to be in demand to debate the ques¬ 
tion of baptism; and among his bound pamphlets I 
find some of these discussions printed by the communi¬ 
ties in whose services the debates were held. Indeed, 
336 


SOME PREACHERS I HAVE KNOWN. 


for many years it was a tonic for his blood to give a 
word of exhortation and sound doctrine to his friends 
of immersionist persuasion, and on such occasions they 
were treated to something besides water. When he 
was among the makers of Methodism in Kansas, this 
gift was in frequent demand, for Campbellism was 
ubiquitous; and the Doctor no more shunned an en¬ 
counter of this sort than a warrior the battle. All 
things being equal, he enjoyed giving these antagonists 
a taste of sound theology. In the days of the mak¬ 
ing of the Church this controversal spirit was necessary 
and wholesome. Methodism has preached practical 
predestination from the face of the continent. The 
Methodist preacher of forty years ago could do two 
things outside of his ordinary ministerial functions with 
cheerfulness, alacrity, and delight, viz.: argue baptism 
and foreordination. In Kansas, Mitchell, Rhodes, Rice, 
Pendleton, and Davis were willing to take up this cause 
and give proper enlightenment on these topics; and in 
so doing they virtually changed the face of theology, 
irrespective of denomination. 

In 1853 Bishop Morris transferred him to St. Louis 
and stationed him at Ebenezer Chapel, then the only 
Methodist Episcopal church in the city, at a time when 
that metropolis needed a man of superior powers, of 
brave and judicious mind which could conciliate when 
conciliation was right and passable. His next remove 
was to McKendree College, whither he went as Profes¬ 
sor of Natural Science. This position he filled for 
three years, at the time acting as pastor of the Church 
at Lebanon, the college seat. For one year he was act- 
22 337 


• THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 

ing president and was offered and refused the presi¬ 
dency. At this time, and often thereafter, vigorous 
efforts were made to draw the eloquent preacher east¬ 
ward. Bishop Thomson specially insisted on trans¬ 
ferring him to New York. Dr. Davis, however, be¬ 
lieved it God’s will that he should identify his life with 
the life of the Church in the great valley of the Mis¬ 
sissippi; and in June, 1858, being elected to the presi¬ 
dency of Baker University, he accepted the election as 
a call of God, and in September of that year came to 
Kansas, where for more than a third of a century he 
labored with a zeal that was as unwavering as his love 
to God and man was warm and tender. Baker Uni¬ 
versity, to whose presidency he had been elected, had 
been chartered in February of 1858 and was, conse¬ 
quently, the earliest founded of all the colleges of arts 
in Kansas. This institution was located at Baldwin, 
which was peculiar in this: the college came first, the 
town afterward. Baldwin alone, of all the college seats 
in Kansas, has this unique peculiarity. This city is 
the result of the college, which fact has had a marked 
influence in forming both town and college. President 
Davis was empowered to bring his own Faculty, and in 
September, 1858, Baker University began its labor— 
a toil which has known no respite to this hour and which 
bids fair to endure while Methodism has a place in 
the annals of the world. To this work Dr. Davis gave 
the vigor of his manhood, then at its high noon. He 
was a man of mighty faith, of heroic courage, of in¬ 
dustry which knew no weariness; and every power of 
mind and heart he flung with spendthrift prodigality 
338 


SOME PREACHERS I HAVE KNOWN, 


into his noble labor. To the day of his death Baker 
University shared with his family the love of this 
manly heart. He no more forgot it than a mother 
her babe. Sleeping or waking, in the days of peace 
or on the field when sounded the alarms of war, he 
hoped for it, gave to it, labored and prayed for it. He 
was wont to read at chapel service in those early days, 
when the prairies were one virgin waste, that rose-tinted 
prophecy, “The wilderness and the solitary place shall 
be glad for themand he lived to read it again many 
times when the college for which he had toiled with 
such unremitting devotion had reached an enviable pin¬ 
nacle of influence and assured success. He lived to see 
Baker University a power in the State, with the loveli¬ 
est campus in Kansas, with good buildings equipped 
with the appurtenances of successful work, with a Fac¬ 
ulty of twenty-one teachers, and an annual enrollment 
of over five hundred; and as he lay on what proved 
his dying-bed at the Commencement season of 1893, his 
love still clung to the college as the father to the hand 
of his child. He would ask the president regarding 
the welfare of the institution when his voice, which 
had been like a battle trumpet, was little more than an 
echo of its old-time self. He would wake from his 
slumber and say to that dear woman whose love and 
fidelity had been to him more than words could frame, 
“Is it near Commencement.?” And when assured in 
the affirmative, he whispered, “It will be the first I 
have missed in more than thirty years save when in the 
army.” Such loyalty as this captivates like a vision 
of the sea. 


339 


THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 

In 1858 and later the Kansas and Nebraska Con¬ 
ference included Kansas, Nebraska, Colorado to the 
peaks of the mountains. New Mexico, Texas, and Utah. 
To such vast regions Methodism and freedom had come, 
the inhalation of the breath from such spaces seemed 
to beget a mighty manhood; and when President Davis 
came, the fever of a great struggle was on. Kansas 
was the forerunner of freedom. What Plymouth was 
to the old American, that Kansas was to the new. His¬ 
torically it is true that Puritanism has deserted Mas¬ 
sachusetts to pitch her tent on Kansas soil. Because 
Kansas was the battle-ground between slavery and free¬ 
dom, great souls strong with splendid Puritan spirit 
came, nor could be detained. What seemed but a bap¬ 
tism of blood proved a baptism of life and power. 
Kansas received the noblest colonists that ever came to 
an uninhabited waste. Sumner, Phillips, and other souls 
of kindred greatness, spoke in words that burned like 
lightning bolts and pointed men to the new battlefield 
of liberty; and so New England emptied her treasures 
of money, brain, and heart that Kansas might prove a 
barrier against the encroachment of that power which 
knew no satiation, but an infinite hunger like the sea. 
In such a crisis this preacher came; and it is safe to 
declare that of all who came, no man was better equipped 
to play a man’s part in the drama. He was by na¬ 
ture chivalrous. No knight had more of refined cour¬ 
tesy. He was the soul of honor. His was a poet’s tem¬ 
perament. The occasion seized him. He was the in¬ 
timate associate of Lane, Robinson, Goodnough, Mont¬ 
gomery, and other free-state men of those great days. 
340 


SOME PREACHERS I HAVE KNOWN. 


He was chaplain of the Wyandotte Convention, ren¬ 
dered historic as the hody of anti-slavery men which 
drafted the constitution of Kansas. He was a mem¬ 
ber of the first Legislature. His voice sounded like a 
prophet’s speech. He was in the secret councils of those 
stormy days, and was politician as well as educator 
and preacher. As president of Baker University he 
preached a sermon on the murder of John Brown at 
Harper’s Ferry; and the Hon. Everett Dallas has told 
the writer it was the most remarkable effort to which 
he ever listened. The man and the occasion had met. 
His genius for speech would be set on fire at such an 
hour. And thus it was, by circumstances of momen¬ 
tous sort, by ability which was far removed from me¬ 
diocrity, by powers stirred by the exigency of a na¬ 
tion’s crisis, he became a legitimate “part of all that 
he had met.” 

In those days illustrious for action, in that conflict 
which brought, though with sword and blood, peace 
from war and freedom from slavery, “Werter Davis” 
was a household word. When the rebellion opened, he, 
then presiding elder of the Baldwin City District, en¬ 
listed, and three-fourths of his preachers with him. 
The battle-hour did not call to him in vain. He was 
appointed chaplain, was afterward made colonel of the 
Sixteenth Kansas Cavalry, and became the commandant 
of Fort Leavenworth. He was always a man of mili¬ 
tary bearing, and when mounted on his black charger 
with the trappings of war, was every whit a soldier; 
and to the old soldiers he is always “Colonel Davis.” 
After the surrender of Lee he was commander of an 
341 


THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


expedition against the Indians in the Black Hills. Dur¬ 
ing the campaign so characteristic an incident occurred 
as to be well worthy of mention. Great annoyance aris¬ 
ing from dancing continued all night to the discom¬ 
fort of those who did not participate, Colonel Davis is¬ 
sued an order to the effect that in dancing the gentle¬ 
men would occupy one building, the ladies another. It 
is needless to remark the dancing immediately ceased. 

Among the mementos which his wife and children 
prize most highly are a brace of gold-mounted revolv¬ 
ers presented Colonel Davis, and the ivory-hilted saber, 
presented by his regiment, which used to clank at his 
side. 

He was as faithful and valiant a soldier for the 
Union as he was for his “Master, even Christ.” Fear 
was a word he did not know. At different times in 
his life he was, unarmed, attacked, and mastered armed 
thieves in his house. At another time, his eldest son 
falling into a deep well, he made a perilous descent 
upon a rope, rescued the boy, was drawn up, and his 
hands were burned to the bone by the attrition of de¬ 
scent. When preaching in Virginia he, unaided, took 
from jail a young lady teacher imprisoned for the hei¬ 
nous crime of reading the New York Tribune, During 
the expedition to the Black Hills he quelled a mutiny 
among the soldiers, appearing before them and declar¬ 
ing that unless there was a return to duty by such an 
hour he would turn the cannon upon them. With 
him duty was autocrat. If duty called, nothing could 
stay his goings. His eyes could flare like watch-fires 
in the wind, and the glance of his wrath was terrible. 
342 


SOME PREACHERS I HAVE KNOWN. 


Yet he was by instinct and grace a man of peace, and 
when the war was over he reassumed the presiding el¬ 
dership, and for fourteen consecutive years served the 
Church in that capacity. He rode districts when he 
could reach home only once in six weehs, when the 
flooded rivers cried, “No thoroughfare!” but he, as in¬ 
tent on the discharge of these services as if an earthly 
general had commanded, swam streams like the Asbury 
of old. Nothing daunted him nor stayed him. The 
heroism that was his possession never forsook him. Un¬ 
ostentatiously he kept his line of march, the goal of 
which was the seizing of Kansas for Methodism and 
God; and it is as safe to say as has been declared, by 
one who is entirely conversant with the facts, that to 
no one man is Kansas Methodism (the greatest denomi¬ 
nation within the borders of the State) so greatly in¬ 
debted as to Werter R. Davis. But whatever his serv¬ 
ice, he did it without thought of self-sufficiency or in¬ 
vidious comparison, but rather was driven onward by the 
love of his life, which was to do the will of God. Dur¬ 
ing those years of the planting of the Church he was 
at three distinct times president of Baker University, 
assuming that responsibility when others left the post 
unoccupied. He at one time, as Captain Lew Green 
has recorded, saved the college from mortgage fore¬ 
closure by giving a note (in company with others) on 
the demand of the creditor that if Dr. Davis would 
stand surety for the debt he would be satisffed; and 
this note he alone paid. He was associated in these 
early ministerial labors with those men of God; Den¬ 
nison, Mitchell, Rice, Fisher, Dearborn, Lawrence, 
343 


THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


Bowman, Dennis, Shaw, and others. To the setting 
of his day his love for these men was warm as a sum¬ 
mer noon. With Dr. Fisher he lodged the first night 
of his sojourn in Kansas, and for him he always re¬ 
tained a tender regard. He clung to his friends with 
that tenacity of affection which was a distinctive fea¬ 
ture of his noble character. 

For the closing thirteen years of his ministry and 
life he was in the pastorate. His last charge was 
served five years; and his flock mourned his going like 
the departure of a father. Since his coming to Kansas 
in the fifties, wherever he lived he had looked on Bald¬ 
win as his home. Here he hoped to come at last to die. 
And it was esteemed a special blessing from God that 
the last ten years of his life were spent in or near Bald¬ 
win. Men could tell the Sabbath was near by Dr. Davis 
taking the train for his Sabbath appointment, and that 
Sabbath was past by his turning his dear, genial face 
toward his home. 

Here he saw his youngest son graduate from the 
college of the father’s love and devotion, saw him (as 
the fruit of unnumbered prayers) enter the ministry 
of the Son of God, and with tears of unspeakable thank¬ 
fulness heard him preach his first sermon. Here he 
lived. Erect, hair and beard white with age, voice 
strong, smile genial as spring, step elastic, heart like 
the heart of youth, hope eager as if life were a com¬ 
ing rather than a departing glory, helpful, without cen¬ 
soriousness, with a nobility of pride which was dignified 
and manly, with only love for his brethren and rejoic¬ 
ing in their labors and successes. He was a man of 
344 


SOME PREACHERS I HAVE KNOWN. 


firm, unwavering convictions, not dogmatic, nor self- 
assertive, but absolutely loyal to the truth, of unswerv¬ 
ing courage, in whose vocabulary fear had no place, of 
dignity without haughtiness, of modesty as lovely as 
the violets of the spring, of courtesy natural and per¬ 
ennial, of faith fixed as the stars, of loyalty to coun¬ 
try, home, and God, unswerving in its absolute fidelity, 
of love warm as noon and genial as evening. Such a 
man he was, and such he moved in and out among the 
students, an inspiration and a blessing, and in the last 
group of all the students photographed, the benignant 
face of this friend and brother makes one of the com¬ 
pany, a fitting place for him whose heart was young 
and whose sympathy was a perpetual spring. Here 
he lived, and here he passed “to where beyond these 
voices there is peace.” 

As an educator Dr. Davis shaped the destiny of the 
first college of Kansas and placed an indelible impress 
on the educational work of that State. As a preacher 
he was fervent, faithful. For years he was allowed to 
be the most eloquent man west of the Mississippi. He 
was an extemporaneous speaker. His flow of speech 
was wonderful. The writer has heard many speakers, 
but none whose fecundity of utterance surpassed his. 
His thought walked on high levels. His eloquence was 
like the rush of streams on the mountains. It had 
voice and majesty. He was, as must always be true 
of the orator, unequal; but when the occasion seized 
him, the man was sublime. The writer heard him 
preach on, “We beholding as in a glass the glory of 
God, are changed from glory into glory,” and the 
345 


THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


sermon was, conservatively speaking, the greatest to 
which he ever listened. To this discourse, he deliv¬ 
ered in the days of his decaying strength, Griffis, 
Pendleton, and such men listened; while hallelujahs 
broke the sermon with their tumult. Truly, as his 
beloved friend. Rev. C. R. Rice, said, “His were 
eloquent lips.” It is to be regretted that he had a 
distaste for writing which kept him from recording the 
facts of his variegated career, for they were inter¬ 
esting as a romance of chivalry, and had possessed a 
rare historic interest. He had associated on intimate 
terms with the leading men of the Church, and his 
memory was a wilderness of fresh reminiscence. Often 
importuned to write, he as often refused, and left no 
record of a life so filled with incidents of an unusual 
sort as to have made a narrative of abiding interest. 
He was soldier, educator, preacher. But he never es¬ 
teemed himself other than preacher. That was his 
life. To him life without preaching would have been 
death. It was the oft expressed desire of his heart 
that God would let him die in the work of the active 
ministry. And those of his family who loved him with 
that depth of tenderness which his nobility of soul, 
transparency of nature and wealth of love, made im¬ 
perative, give thanks to God that his prayer was heard 
and answered and that as a pastor in charge he died. 

He had an exalted conception of the Christian min- 
istry. To have preached Christ was a glory which 
could not die. To use his own words: “I know of no 
greater honor, no greater dignity, and no greater priv¬ 
ilege than to be a minister of Jesus Christ.” There 
346 


SOME PREACHERS I HAVE KNOWN. 


was virility in his conception of the gospel. The great 
root thought of redemption possessed him. The atone¬ 
ment of the blood of a divine Christ, as Dr. Fisher 
has acutely remarked, was the undercurrent of prayer 
and preaching. His gospel was one of power, not a 
commingling of weak inanities. The power of God “to 
save to the uttermost” was a doctrine he loved with 
an unwasting love. As was logically necessary, there 
grew /rom this foundation principle a gospel of vic¬ 
tory. With him redemption meant triumph. He be¬ 
lieved victory should shout in a man’s heart above the 
din of conflict. Indeed it was “a glorious gospel” to 
which he yielded obedience, one full of comfort, praise, 
and unspeakable triumph. Heaven was not faith but 
fact, and as real to his heart as his home on earth. 

Above all else Werter Davis was saint. These true 
gospel views colored his life. He was helpful and 
heavenly minded. To him love meant self-renuncia¬ 
tion. He was never false to a friend. He was never 
other than the soul of courtesy. To him impurity was 
ignoble, hellish, unthinkable. He could not stoop to 
trickery for self-aggrandizement. No man can name 
a dishonorable deed this man ever performed. This is 
making a remarkable claim, I am aware, but it is made 
for a truth and a challenge. To those of his own house¬ 
hold, he was unspeakably dear and prized beyond all 
measure. The saintliness which shines like far fair 
stars, unwavering and undimmed, in the daily routine of 
domestic life, is the saintliness that Christ has told us 
of. As a man, as a husband, as a father, this man 
left little to ask. And it was a solace to him that on 
347 


THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


his dying bed he saw all his living children as he was 
to see those who had died long since, when death should 
be swallowed up of life. His home-coming week by 
week was looked for as the coming of the spring, when 
long delayed. There was that in him which made you 
feel safe in his love. He was a spendthrift of affec¬ 
tion. He gave all. Nothing was too costly for those 
he loved; and if any man was ever a father whose 
character was citadeled beyond all blame, this was he. 

This aged servant of God lies dying. His house 
is in order, as it has been for longer than a half cen¬ 
tury. “I wait my time—His time,” he says. To this 
man the preaching of the Christ has been “more than 
meat and drink.” He knows nothing else. “This 
one thing I do,” has been the motto of his whole 
life; and now that he stands so close to heaven as to 
hear its many holy voices, in his slumbers and dreams 
he preaches and administers the sacrament. As life 
had but one thought—his weary, sick-bed slumber con¬ 
tinues it. His lips slowly utter, while his hands are 
spread out before God in holy ecstasy—“The atone¬ 
ment of His blood is all-sufficient,” and his half ut¬ 
tered word breaks off in weariness. His hands seem 
breaking bread to kneeling saints, and then he whis¬ 
pers, “I can not finish the table, I grow so—so weary.” 
As the end grows near, when asked by a friend of 
former years, “Will you give us a word regarding 
your hope?” the dying saint said in terms of mild 
reproach, “Have I not told you I have left all to 
So confidingly he trusted all to Him, whose he was 
and whom he served. 


348 


SOME PREACHERS I HAVE KNOWN. 


His breath is labored. Life struggles hard with 
death. Then he breathes easier. At last his breath 
comes like the breath of a child. Midnight passes. 
Easier, softer the inhalation. He folds his own hands 
upon his bosom. His eyes close. Peace unspeakable 
settles on his face. Men and women with breaking 
hearts lean over him to catch the sound of breath and 
feel the beating of his heart. No struggle, no sign 
to tell when life is gone and death is come. Only the 
heart beats faint, fainter; and a saintly spirit has 
slipped from its earthly moorings and leaves hearts 
filled with an unguessed sorrow at his death, but the 
world the richer for his life. On his dead face there 
was a smile, as if in his going he had met a Friend 
he loved. 

A BEAUTIFUL LIFE. 

And is Edward Gill dead.^^ Is that kind gentle¬ 
man with his sunny heart and sunny face not to pass 
the time of day along our street again Frankly, 
this seems incredible. He has gone on a journey and 
will be back soon—this is how we feel it. Not dead, 
but journeying. And this is the larger and therefore 
truer view to entertain. He has gone out, seeing the 
beckoning of the Christ. He is journeying far. On 
his dear face is glorious morning light. All the weari¬ 
ness and fainting are vanished from his steps. He 
walks with alacrity up the long glory of the mount 
of God. 

Edward Gill was a Manxman, who came to America 
lad, learned the blacksmith’s trade, enlisted as 
349 


as a 


THE PASTOR-PREACHER 


a Union soldier in the Kansas artillery, fought like 
a man, loved his adopted country with a fealty good 
to see and feel, was called of God to preach, and spent 
the major part of a life of sixty-seven years preach¬ 
ing the gospel in the Methodist ministry of Kansas. 
He was a man of no educational advantages, having 
gone to school scarcely at all, but had an alert intelli¬ 
gence, a capacious memory, a love of truth and knowl¬ 
edge, a predisposition toward historical studies, a sense 
of the worth of the world, a love for people, a knowl¬ 
edge of the human heart which read the soul with 
great accuracy and with much tenderness, so that while 
to himself his lack of formal education was a handicap 
he never could rid himself of, those who listened to 
him did not feel it. They knew they were listening 
to one of God’s larger souls talking of the things of 
heaven. 

He was a pure man. I have not known many 
men his equals in the art of purity. Knowing him as 
no other living man knew him, I can say his was a 
clean heart. You felt when with him that you were 
enveloped in sea air. You could not learn evil from 
Edward Gill, but, though you were never so dull a 
scholar, you could scarcely fail to learn purity from 
him. 

Living with him as a child, knowing his every-day 
life through many, many years, I must in truth say 
I have not known a whiter spirit. It would be im¬ 
possible to think of Edward Gill doing a mean thing. 
His life was fashioned after a different model. 

He was genial. His laughter was contagious. I 

350 


SOME PREACHERS I HAVE KNOWlN. 


think of it now. What a rollick there was in his glee, 
that fairly set sober people to hilarity! He saw life’s 
funny side and enjoyed it as all best people do. He 
enjoyed life. Things seemed good to him. The world 
was not so much a vale of tears as a goodly place 
where life grew in the sunlight and the storm as the 
flowers do. In him was nothing dyspeptic, nothing 
morose, no thread of sullenness. He loved the world, 
had large familiarity with it; the more he knew the 
more he enjoyed. He was joyous. Sunshine had come 
when he came. People, seeing him, thought, “It is 
sun-up now.” 

He loved people. He never tried to like them. 
He liked them. He was not so much a student of 
psychology as he was an expert in psychology. He 
knew folks as they were. He felt men’s souls. He 
neighbored with their experiences. He never intruded, 
but slipped into the lives of people as the sunshine 
does. He loved people, and in fairness people loved 
him. A lady came to the chancel of my Church one 
Sunday morning and said, “How is Brother Gill.'^” 
“In heaven,” I sobbed; and she went away with not 
a word, but with great weeping. 

Some people we can not spare even to go to heaven. 
Life seems good when men like Edward Gill are around. 
Something is always lacking when such as he are gone. 
We go around with a lonesome feeling at the heart. 
He is gone, gone. 

No man ever lived with less of self-seeking in him 
than this man. It was unthinkable of him. He never 
planned for himself. In the years of his ministry he 
351 


THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


never lifted a finger for an appointment. He had no 
need to. He was wanted. A warm heart, a strong 
intelligence, a sound sense, a practical dealer with liv¬ 
ing hearts, a lover of children, an apt enterer into 
the experiences of others, a soothing voice in the house 
of sorrow, a sense that all had that this man cared 
for them and their griefs, made him one of a thou¬ 
sand ministers to bring help to the broken heart and 
strength to such as had fallen by the way. And these 
things made him an eloquent preacher of the Cross. 
And his prayers were very gracious. His religious life 
was steady. He never ranted. He spoke out of a 
true and manly heart. God was with him. He loved 
to make mention of that. He preached what he had— 
namely, experimental religion. To me, when his voice 
was as thin as a whisper, he said: “I want you to know 
that the religion I have preached to others sustains 
me now.” That is the very wine of Edward Gill’s 
spirit. Sincere, and possessing the things whereof 
he spake, and speaking because he possessed it. A 
true man living with God, happy in the fellowship, 
ardent in his love for his vocation, glad for a chance 
to help God save His world, preaching to almost the 
last week of his life, taking in money for the Lord’s 
work with his dying fingers, as I myself saw him, 
and going out into the land of God as quietly as a 
little child falls asleep at the close of a long day, so 
Edward Gill closed his ministry. He was happily mar¬ 
ried to Nettie Warren, of Puritan stock, who has been 
to him a joy and help and strength these years, and 
whose ministries at his death were so precious that 
352 


SOME PREACHERS I HAVE KNOWN. 

he would have no other. He leaves a daughter and 
son; and two little sons met him at the heavenly gate. 

It was a beautiful life this man lived. Strong, 
tender, very true, democratic, loyal to his friends, al¬ 
most if not altogether without enemies, happy in his 
work, fitted for that work, having incalculable wealth 
in friends and work honorably done, sure of God, set¬ 
ting straight course for heaven, hearing the Pilot’s 
voice and rejoicing in its music, answering through 
the fogs, “Here am I, this way, and ready,” and going 
near the end of his Conference year with a last work 
accomplished, his life ended like a poem, and reads 
like one. Dear heart, till we see thee, in the morning, 
good-night. 

‘‘For all the saints who from their labors rest, 

Who Thee by faith before the world confessed. 

Thy name, O Jesus, be forever blessed. 

Hallelujah, Hallelujah. * * 


353 


The Destination of A Sermon. 

What is the business of a sermon? is a pungent 
question any man wants to get an answer to before 
he goes so far as a pulpit. He may not experiment 
with a sermon. The sermon is a community affair. 
Just as an investigative mind must not experiment with 
explosives out on the open street, because himself he 
might run risks with, but the community is not his 
to imperil. Immortal Issues are presumptively at stake 
in the sermon. It is not a literary production, though 
possessing literary form. Since Christ came and went, 
a sermon is God’s way of getting God’s thought and 
God’s law and God’s will prevalent among the inhabit¬ 
ants of this earth, object of the redemptive death of 
Christ, the Son of God. Now, we are in the pres¬ 
ence of a mystery and in the presence of a community 
mystery and in the presence of an immortal mystery. 
A sermon bridges eternity with its arch. So great a 
sermon is. Fear must be on us when we attempt a 
thing which has such tremendous interests in its neigh¬ 
borhood. A sermon defined is: A definite attempt by 
a man called of God to get other mortals like him¬ 
self to God and keep them with God. If this defini¬ 
tion stand, then we may eliminate many things and 
yet retain the real thing. The sermon has God as its 
objective. A sermon has man as its field and the sow- 
354 


THE DESTINATION OF A SERMON. 


ing of holiness in his heart with unremitting toil to 
bring that lost territory back to the sovereignty of 
King Immanuel. 

It is doing battle by means of good seed. What 
a strange battle that is! Truly strange, and, by that, 
the more dangerous. You might capture a city with 
mining and sapping, or with storming, but in any case 
with battle impulse and battle enginery. Not so the 
city of Man’s Soul. The seed, which is the Word of 
God, must be sown. A preacher is the sower, going 
forth to sow. He wants man for God. He wants to 
pre-empt the rank field for the Heavenly Master. The 
city of Man’s Soul is a field, therein the mystery ob¬ 
tains. This field-city has one inhabitant, only one, 
always one. One man out fighting for one man for 
the one great God. 

A sermon so apprehended becomes a new literary 
expression to this world. It may have in its presen¬ 
tation of the message of God all sorts of beauties, 
fascinations, literary charm, adventurous thought, sub¬ 
lime passages rivaling the summits of the Andes, music 
like the wallowing sea at stormy climaxes, but that is 
purely incidental. If an essayist possessed the power 
to do any one of these things here enumerated, he 
would be held fast by fame and led among those who 
are too great to die. But any one of these, yea, and 
all of these, do not suffice to make a sermon great. 

The essay needs no goal. It may wander where 
it will in witless vagabondage, as Holmes or Elia, and 
be none the worse, but rather the better. The essay 
is not making out a case; it is saying its say. The 
355 


THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


how of the saying is plenty, leaving the what is said 
out of the account altogether. Who on earth cares 
what Elia says, or Lowell? What do we mind 
whether we agree with the essayist of the “Upton Let¬ 
ters” and “From a College Window?” What he says 
is his matter; how he says is our matter, and a very 
engaging matter it is. Walter Pater we say is a styl¬ 
ist. And that is the word to use when Walter Pater 
is discussed. Stylist he was. And is there a sneer 
in the word? No sneer. But he being stylist, we 
are content. We read Maurice Hewlett preoccupied 
as to what he says and waken as from a day-dream, 
saying—I did not quite catch what he said—but we 
read him for the vivacity, the verbiage, the dash, the 
virile word, the swift glance running more than half 
round the sky. We read Hawthorne as we listen to 
a bobolink, not as caring to interpret his tones into 
words, but half drunk with his melody. We do not 
read Poe for thoughts, but for the sense of swooning 
there is on his opiate river. These men named might 
all have more than has been symboled here, but needed 
not to have more. With a single credential they have 
access to the presence chamber. 

The sermon is not so. It might have all these es¬ 
sential lovelinesses of the essayist at his sunny morn¬ 
ing might, but the sermon lack—all. These things 
might be present and thereby drug the sermon. The 
sermon, whatsoever else it have, must present the pas¬ 
sion for souls, the tragedy of eternity realized; aye, 
and an eternity without God. The sermon is two 
hands, sinewy, wounded, blood-drenched and bleeding 
356 


THE DESTINATION OF A SERMON. 


yet, two hands lifting, lifting, lifting at a human soul 
to lift it up where it might catch sight of the cross 
of God. In a certain story of wide renown and won¬ 
drous pathos, a woman is holding her child up toward 
a prison window and bidding it look; for at the win¬ 
dow stands the baby’s father, but the woman is weep¬ 
ing, so she could not see the prisoner’s face were she 
to front it. The preacher in his sermon is ever lifting 
the child, the woman, the man up, up a little higher, 
if it might come to pass that body might see the Face. 
And the sermon lifts and calls with words that drip 
blood, “See you the cross, yet—see you the cross and 
Him upon the cross?” 

The sermon, then, is the most serious form litera¬ 
ture has assumed. It is hot on the quest. It does 
many things, but only on the way to the main thing, 
which is invariably the getting and keeping the soul 
with God. Fervor is in this mighty task. The ser¬ 
mon has all tragedy lingering about its theme and all 
comedy (using that word in the sense in which Dante 
used it) in the outcome of the gospel venture. 

This main intent of any sermon eclipses all things 
else. With this is the preacher’s mind and heart 
crowded as the sea chalice with the rushing waters when 
the tides are full. God’s man, making God’s appeal 
to God’s humanity to bring them to God and to keep 
them with God. Such design may be set down as the 
most pregnant purpose this whole, great world knows. 
He must be holy, and must be brave, and must be un¬ 
swerving who undertakes this task sublime. 

In Barrie’s “The Little Minister” is a passage 
35T 


THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


of thrilling import. It is where the little minister is 
sundered by the flood from his parishioners and thinks 
himself, as they think him, doomed to die, and in those 
moments of farewell, when any minute may be his last, 
he lifts his voice, which rises above all the strident 
voices of the storm and flood, and talks not of him¬ 
self and his death, but of them and their deep needs. 
He is their minister; and to that ministry his last 
words are dedicated. I hear his voice rise and clamor 
across the cruel voices of the raging flood, speaking 
to the comfort and the lifting of those members of 
his Church and mortals of his care and beloved of his 
heart. Scant wonder that his auditors sobbed in unison. 

That scene may stand as a painting of a preacher’s 
love and hope and fealty. He is a voice bidding the 
whole, round world come to God and stay with God. 
His sermon has its destination there; for destination 
of voice and man are one. 

And his voice, any preacher voice, sounds out in 
last good-night, ‘‘God be with you till we meet again.” 
Such is the pastor’s auf Wiedersehen. 


358 


Preach-ing or Preach-er? 

Paui. was a great phrasist. Matthew Arnold was 
a great phrasist. And the distance between the two 
is, I think, a difference in substance. Arnold’s phrase 
is the most of the matter; Paul’s phrase is the least 
of the matter. In “sweetness and light”—there is 
really not much in that when you run it down; and 
what little there is, I feel is a trifle sickly. In it there 
is little of either Greek or Saxon valor and muscle. 
“Philistine” is a phrase, but a priggish phrase, an un¬ 
worthy phrase, unfit for the lips of any of God’s dem¬ 
ocrats. Who are any of us to paste the label “philis¬ 
tine” on any of the others of us.? But Paul’s phrases 
bulk in thought. They were not rainbows made from 
temporary mists, but hill-heights made of stable gran¬ 
ite. Brawny thoughts, ponderous as mountains Titans 
sweated to hurl, were in his heart; and he spoke them 
in forms unforgettable as sea billows. Paul as phrasist 
is a theme which would bring wild tumults of quick 
drawn breath and lunge of pulse and aching heart and 
huzzahing moods like a victor in a cavalcade of cru¬ 
saders trampling over the crescent with the cross. 

But this hour we must march on without even so 
much as a sidelong look at that stimulating theme, 
save to grasp one of his phrases for a flag to plant 
over us for a little time. The flapping of its brave 
359 


THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


folds may perchance make us dream we hear the 
flapping of an eagle’s wings. This phrase is, “Who 
gave Himself.” And, of course, Paul is talking about 
Christ. This maker of deathless and tremendous phrases 
says “Christ gave Himself.” Thus does Paul epito¬ 
mize, not jeopardize, the divine career in the person 
of the Christ of God. “I am here,” the career of 
Jesus said, “to give Myself.” 

This is why every man of us is here. We are come 
to give ourselves. A preacher is to give himself. He 
is here for the enrichment of the world. A man is 
an estate; and at death should any of that estate be 
left on hand the man is by so much a failure. We 
are put on the world of God to give ourselves away 
to the world—not to gain, but to give; not to amass, 
but to disburse. The angel at the gates of life will 
make this inquiry of every comer, “Did you spend all 
your estate.'^” And blessed shall he be who can an¬ 
swer, “I have nothing left,” it being understood that 
the estate the angel asks us of is the estate of self. 
Christ gave every thought of brain, every syllable of 
speech, every footprint of every journey, every touch 
of gentle compassion, every call at the door of death, 
“Come forth,” every laying hand on wicked sea waves 
to stop their snarl and to make all their jangling 
voices hush, every tear which ached from his heart, 
every tired day of work, each pulse of which was 
praise; every word which hacked like angel’s sword at 
Eden’s gate, every word or work of heart’s-ease, every 
tune in human hearts for which He struck the key, 
every heart He loved to help, all scarred lips He loved 
360 


PREACH-ING OR PREACH-ER. 


to kiss, every fleet of noble thoughts He launched upon 
the sea of time and eternity; the cross He stooped to 
carry, and the cross on which He chose to die, the 
grave He slept in to sanctify forever, the mom He 
woke, the sin He “nailed to His cross,” the resurrec¬ 
tion He lifted like a radiant cloud swung to the pil¬ 
lars that upheld the sky to flaunt it in the face of 
death while time endured;—in all these things He did 
but give Himself. “Emptied Himself,” is the mas¬ 
sive and dramatic putting of this truth. “Gave Him¬ 
self,” with the resultant term, “Emptied Himself.” 
Nothing left in Christ unused when He left us to jour¬ 
ney back to God. He had given Himself out—had 
given Himself away. 

Jesus had nothing left. Empty as a drained cask; 
this is Christ’s new program for life. Not to hunt 
ease, but to hunt travail; not to count costs, but to 
boldly venture all; to drain life dry and make self 
a lordly contribution to the world. Does that ring 
as a hero plan of life? It is the hero plan for life, 
and pulses with power like the unsleeping sea. Ques¬ 
tion, “What is life for?” Answer, “To give yourself.” 
This is why God put us here, that at the end we should 
not simply have exhausted the saps of the world, but 
that we should have incredibly enriched the world, hav¬ 
ing given back all we borrowed, plus. 

This view of life’s business makes life immensely 
self-respecting. We cease being sponges, and become 
enrichers. We earn our board and endow the world. 

In a sublime regard the preacher’s vocation is to 
give himself. Preacher, what are you working at? 
361 


THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


And he, without stopping to look up or wipe the sweat 
away, answers like a leaping sword, ‘‘Giving myself.” 
Pour out himself. Sun at the morning’s east, what 
is your day’s toil? And the sun lifts and spills the 
bowl of the world full of light and the inverted bowl 
of the sky full of delight, and shouts like a soldier 
swinging into battle’s sword play, “To give myself.” 
The sun’s business is the preacher’s business. And 
the sun learned his occupation from the Christ, who 
would teach things and spirits that all we exist for 
is to give ourselves. 

But the preacher’s business is to preach? No, 
brother, no. His business is to give himself. He is 
not the trumpet, but the trumpeter; not the sword, 
but the soldier. Preaching is a method, one method, 
of the preacher giving himself; and the sermon be¬ 
comes not an exploit, but an evidence and certificate 
of what breed of soul the preacher is. What about 
preaching? That is a word the Greeks would have 
been mystified by. That lexicon term would have made 
their brows wrinkle like the rind of a tree. They had 
all the words meaning preach, saw them all, but the 
Greeks were too quick of wit not to see that our word 
“preach” had been schooled to some larger meaning 
than any meaning their lexicon affixed. That word 
was unused before Christ had come along the road and 
had stopped to tell His story to mankind. Men knew 
little, but did know enough to know that a word must 
be set aside, sanctified, “hagiazoed,” to mean and mark 
that glorious procedure. Though no Greek knew what 
“preaching” was, nor any Roman would have recog- 
362 


PREACH-ING OR PREACH-ER. 


nized this word, the word has grown big enough, en¬ 
larged by whole diameters since the old Greek and 
Roman days, so that the modern world knows the word 
“preaching” by heart, nor can snub it nor alFect to 
be ignorant of its impart. All mankind knows the 
thing preaching is: A man telling about the God-man, 
Christ. A man called of God, talking about every¬ 
thing that touches man and God—^that is, preaching. 

Preaching is the art of making a sermon and de¬ 
livering it.f* Why, no, that is not preaching. Preach¬ 
ing is the art of making a preacher and delivering 
that. Preaching is the art of the man giving him¬ 
self to the throng by means of voice and gesture and 
face and brains and heart, and the background of all 
these, himself. Florentine inlaid work or a cameo cut 
fine as the veinings of a flower or Dawn or Moses 
chiseled from the white drift of marble snow as Angelo 
did—is this a sermon A cunning mosaic of multi¬ 
colored, multi-shaped loveliness, put together with 
chaste care—is this a sermon Making a herbarium 
of flowers pressed and dried, especially dried, is this 
a sermon? Well, no. Preaching is the outrush of the 
soul in speech. Therefore, the elemental business in 
preaching is not with the preaching, but with the 
preacher. It is no trouble to preach, but a vast trouble 
to construct a preacher. To study lines fine as the 
under-veining of a leaf, or the chaste lines in an etch¬ 
ing, or the strong lines in the forehead of age, this 
is worthy truly. But to study the mountain region 
unhurt by winter and untouched by storm, unperturbed, 
enduring, this also is worthy. To know when to kiss 
363 


THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


a child and when to kiss an old woman’s withered cheek, 
when to answer to the thrill of muscularity, and when 
to kiss a man on the cheek through tears and moan¬ 
ing, this is needed. In this and kindred discernments 
the preacher is urged toward his task. He is, to use 
Milton’s mighty phrase, “mewing a mighty youth.” 
He is getting proportions. He is to cast more than 
a shadow. If he is massive people will feel him as 
they feel the solid world. 

There is little trouble to preach, if only there be 
a preacher. Preacher-ing, not preach-ing, is the task. 
Mount Hood has no trouble holding Winter on his 
breast and brow and brewing reverberant waterfalls 
and crystal river and lifting up a shield, wonderful 
as moonlight, to hold on high for the amazement of 
mankind. Mount Hood does not stoop beneath his 
load. He knows no load. Is he not a mountain? And 
to a mountain what are winter and storm and river 
fountain and splendor of eternal whiteness looking on 
the world like a messenger new come from heaven? 
The mountain is unburdened because it is a mountain. 
Not many days ago I spent a moonlit night upon the 
summit of a mountain of the Cascade range. We 
climbed in the lengthening shadows of the coming night 
and came to rest upon the crest, slippy with pine nee¬ 
dles of unnumbered years. On the mountain’s shoul¬ 
ders grew the huge bulks of colossal Oregon pines. 
The largest trees pre-empted the mountain-top. What 
revelations of vegetable aspiration those trunks were! 
How tall and great-girthed those pillars stood, as if 
set there of Him who builded the night and put those 
364 


PREACH-ING OR PREACH ER. 


pillars there to hold up the night sky, star-besprent. 
They were majestical beyond the telling. And did the 
mountain groan because it was burdened with such 
tropic growth of pine.? Friend, you know the moun¬ 
tain never guessed it wore a burden. It was moun¬ 
tain. The art of being a mountain, then, is the large 
achievement. Burdens then become it as light becomes 
the sun. 

I think we must all be impressed with the ineffable 
sea. It never tries to hold hulks of ships nor swim 
wide squadrons nor toss gray sea-going craft on wave 
crests as if they were bubbles born of the sea. It is 
a sea, and does all this as a painter might paint in 
his sleep and not know it. It is no effort for the sea 
to lift waves in spray and thunder music up against 
the ashen clouds. It is the ocean. To such as are 
oceanic, oceanic moods are natural and effortless. 

In preaching, we always assume that the man is 
called of God and man to His unapproachable office. 
And to such a man the question of a sermon will be 
the question of the man. Every soul comes to his 
effort under limitations, as Samson came to Dagon’s 
temple pillars, gropingly. But stature of soul is not 
a fixed fact. It is a fact depending on him, whose 
soul it is. To be bigger than we were is always a pos¬ 
sibility. And so it comes to pass that a given sermon 
is the preacher to date. The sermon is an act; and 
to this act the preacher brings himself, all himself, 
the acquisition of his years. As Grant brought to bear 
on his campaigns, which are so great as to have passed 
into ‘the pride of all Americans, the maturity of his 
365 


THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


life, so the preacher does. The sermon is the man find¬ 
ing exposition for his soul. When the seatides crowd 
shoreward they fill the riverbeds and bays and crystal 
creeks and crowded harbors, marshes where the glis¬ 
tering grasses wave funereal pennants, drive far in¬ 
land, where men may never have looked upon the sea— 
the seatides do such fathomless things, because they 
are the sea at tide. The preacher floods the souls of 
men and women, and floods dry channels of the heart, 
brings wonder and reason to the brain, unseals the 
fount of tears, wakens drugged conscience from its 
stupor sleep, hammers against the brazen doors of ob¬ 
durate wills—the preacher does this because he is a 
seatide from God’s great sea. The tides drive in, but 
in the proportion of him who is the channel of the 
rising of the tides of God. 

A growing thought could not have said yesterday 
all it says to-day, for the palpable reason that it was 
not yesterday what it is to-day. I think it would have 
given a man a lightning stroke to have seen Webster, 
the thunder-bearer. Even his printed words give a 
sense of a vast personality giving way to itself. We 
feel the man. The might of him makes room. His 
words are not so much studied up as they are let out. 
I feel the same with Wesley. His soul ran streams 
as the mountain does and for like reason. He was 
mountainous. Heaven swept his uplands and his moun¬ 
tains with its winds. He had grown great with God; 
and his writings are not manufactured, therefore, but 
outflowings. They were channels for his overflow of 
soul. 


366 


PREACH-ING OR PREACH-ER. 


A sermon is not a piece of carpentry, but a piece 
of life—a spacious heart, a spacious brain, a spacious 
sympathy talking out loud. A great preacher like 
Paul did not fashion his speech, but fashioned him¬ 
self ; and then, so great did he become that he sat down 
and extemporized the thirteenth chapter of Corinth¬ 
ians to an amanuensis, extemporized the sweetest poem 
ever written, save the Shepherd Psalm. So he did 
with the Resurrection Chapter, which wings away in 
serene ether, where eagles could not, with their tawny 
wings, attempt to soar. But on Paul’s forehead was 
no drop of sweat! He had grown the wings; and it 
was fun to fly. 

A palace lit up by night glows with very many 
lights, because it is very many-windowed. A hovel had 
shone with but a single light because it was but single- 
windowed. A palace-souled preacher will blaze with 
lights, only not with stellar, but with solar lights. A 
great life, telling a great truth, ought to be a definition 
of a preacher at his message. Prior to the knowledge 
we would be morally certain that God would so ar¬ 
range that His messengers by how much they were 
endued with His Spirit would be endued with the 
preacher gift. An appeal to experience will show this 
view to be bootless, very bootless. God apparently 
will not allow a possible perversion of His Spirit. He 
will not let His enduement take the place of possible 
industry on the part of man. A preacher is God-en¬ 
dowed, but is also self-endowed; and a preacher-man’s 
business is to amass a life of cubic dimensions, to the 
end that he may evoke the great power and utter the 
367 


THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


great word. Does not this version make being a 
preacher a sublime business? “Preacher, what are you 
doing? Are you getting up a sermon?” And his 
answer, “Rather I am, by God’s grace, constructing 
a man.” “Working on your sermon, brother?” “No, 
working on the preacher.” Power can be put to al¬ 
most any use. Steam can lift rocks, plow fields, dredge 
harbors, generate electricity, cross continents or seas, 
build ships or locomotives. Preachers are power which 
can be put to similar divergent uses. Power is the 
thing. Be big and we can do. 

What, then, in the light of this is a preacher’s 
task? Plainly this, the amassing of a great self, so 
as to have something worth while to give. To donate 
an empty purse is little worth the trouble, nor is there 
any beneficence. The preacher’s business is not to 
amass a fortune, but to amass a self, and then dis¬ 
tribute that self. The sermon is the preacher up to 
date. All his life flowers in what he is saying at a 
given time. No man can say bigger than he is. He 
can borrow big phrases and tell them; but their vast¬ 
ness is not his. When a planet swims into the sky 
it grips other planets solely in proportion to its bulk. 
Gravitation works directly as the mass'. So does the 
preacher. He must have bulk. He must have great¬ 
ness. 

And the preacher in amassing himself engulfs earth 
and history, and beauty and chemistry, and theology 
and nature, and astronomy and science, and the age 
and the ages, and the Book and the books, and man 
and God. He is not engulfed by them, but engulfs 
368 


PREACH-ING OR PREACH-ER. 


them. He is hard at work making a soul with large in¬ 
tent to utter a great truth. To have heard Isaac New¬ 
ton talk would have been like wrestling stars down and 
making them reveal their secrets. His wonder was his 
intellectual bulk. He did not struggle to utter high 
thoughts. He had them in solution in his blood. For 
Coleridge to sweep out wide and far as a comet in 
his shining career was natural as the falling of a yel¬ 
low leaf. What was in him spoke. 

This engulfing power is the preacher power. He 
must be like the sky which contains constellations, 
milky ways, ether, air, humanity, all physical things. 
Spaciousness is the word. Nor is this amassing self 
and engulfing such tremendous territories as I have 
named, a skyey performance futile as sweeping sea 
waves back. To let the universe sweep into his soul, 
this is a preacher’s business. He will not master all. 
That is not his function. He is to be open to all. 
He is to be as one who rejoices in sunsets, who watches 
for them all. He does not understand them; he looks 
at them. He who looks at the sunset with an attract¬ 
ive gaze will get out at least a part of their wistful 
wonder. Shakespeare was all eyes. Nothing whipped 
past his window that he did not see it and mark it. 
No man can read much. No man can think much. 
No man can deal with science much. No man can 
wear astronomies other than on his breast. No man 
can compass history. No man can get at much more 
than the coastline of the vasty continents. But he can 
be hospitable to all of them. He may be on speaking 
terms with all of them. He may hug them against 
24 369 


THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


his breast with a tenderness like a mother with her 
babe. He may stand at the soul’s doorway and invite 
the universe, “Come in and stay.” “Make wide my 
life, O God!” is his clamant call, which never fails to 
catch the attention of the God of souls. He is at home 
with poets and imaginations, with statues and gardens, 
with children and men, with women and love, with 
struggle and passion, with the flax all but quenched 
and the high resolve that concludes obstructions to be 
but blowing dust through which mankind may wade 
unobstructed. He is at home with the light of dawns 
and stars and noons, with stars and poetry of human 
souls and wastes of sea waves and winds and brute 
force of the storm and the more brutal force of temp¬ 
tations which attempt to slay the soul. He knows the 
symptoms of things. He walks with the throng and 
loves the throng he walks with. The afterglow hangs 
in his sky all the night through. The glow is always 
in his heart. The ages walk past his door, which is 
never shut. In his days and in his dreams he sees 
angels, and has talk with God. He is not a Miss, but 
a Mr. He feels like wrestling with the great sea, and 
thinks he could wrestle it down. The age, he engulfs 
that, but is more concerned in the ages. This is where 
we miss. We talk as if the spirit of the age were 
the superior quest. It is not. The spirit of the ages 
is a Niagara, fleet, tremendous, unhinderable, unthink¬ 
able. In it are God and. man. The spirit of the age 
is a hand-print; the spirit of the ages is a nail-print. 

Man and God, these the preacher has by heart. 
What a blessed luggage they are! The folks for whom 
370 


PREACH-ING OR PREACH-ER. 


God died and the God who died for folks. The wide- 
ness of the world of ground and sky is on such a man. 
He walks in radiancies like a perpetual dawn. He 
talks with God; and God talks with him. And when 
this preacher comes to a Sunday in his journey through 
the week, people ask him, “Preacher-man, where were 
you and what saw you while the workdays were sweat¬ 
ing at their toil.?’” And then of this preacher we may 
say reverently, “He opened his mouth and taught them, 
saying;” and there will be another though lesser Ser¬ 
mon on the Mount. And the auditors sit and sob and 
shout under their breath, and say with their helped 
hearts, “Preacher, saw you and heard you that? You 
were well employed. Go out and listen and look an¬ 
other week; but be very sure to come back and tell 
us what you heard and saw.” That will be preaching. 

Such a man will be big enough to get to places 
he can not see. And that is the thing needed. Almost 
anybody can get to ports visible; but the ports that 
lie across the world and under it, that lie below the 
edges of the sky washed by an unknown sea, those 
are the ports which are difficult and dangerous and 
in voyaging to which is shipwreck. The invisible 
ports—^the preacher will know the way to them. One 
summer I was in the tall mountains and was making 
journey toward a snowy peak, and in my goings lost 
sight of the summit for which I made my quest. I was 
in the swirl of the mountains, as I have had around 
my boat on boiling seas the swirling of the tortured 
waters. I had no compass. I was guideless and alone. 
I had no knowledge of this region, never having 
371 


THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


touched that mountain range before. But I knew that 
the mountain stream knew what its source was and 
where. Its plunge of murmuring waters, clear as air 
and cold as not long run from deep drifts of snow, 
seemed to say, “We are from the snow crest you saw.” 
And I trusted to the stream. I climbed along its wind¬ 
ings mile on mile amidst grim rocks, along smooth 
ledges, under the shag of incense-making pines, over 
frightful boulders, in dark and narrow canyons, up 
slippy rocks tilted toward the patine of blue sky— 
so I toiled, trusting to the stream, hunting for the 
mountain’s snow-white top. And need I say I found 
the white snow crest .f* The stream knew the way to 
its hidden source. 

So the preacher must know the way to the Hidden 
Source. He must trail tendencies. He must keep to 
the main stream; and the rivulets he must pass, only 
giving them a glance; but the stream he must follow 
to the remote and sublime mountain the name of which 
is God. The preacher must be skilled in that. The 
world of people is not much concerned in diacritical 
marks. The little shibboleths over which some make 
so much they care for little or nothing at all. But 
God, where He is and what He is, and man, and whether 
man and God may meet, and help to the strugglings 
and battlings of the soul—^these big things men do 
care about. They want a great God for them if a God 
at all. Their hunger prods them toward the Infinite. 
They do n’t care much where the sky began, but care 
incredibly where the sky ends. That is what they 
want to know. 


372 


PREACH-ING OR PREACH-ER. 


God’s muscular arm, stark naked, hand pierced 
and open, arm unafraid and eager and underneath it 
writ in blood this one word, “Help,” this earth does 
care for; and toward such a divine arm men will grope 
in their night and battle in their day. 

Preacher, have you had that arm about you and 
that pierced hand grip you and deliver you? Then, 
preacher, show them that; and your preaching will 
be an apocalypse. 


373 


Paul, The Preacher. 

If Paul speaks of himself as a preacher less lauded 
than Apollos, we need not be diverted from the facts 
thereby. He was a preacher of such eloquence that 
no greater has arisen in all the days of the Church. 
His humility has stated his impediments, but has not 
asserted his pre-eminence. He was one of the most 
eloquent of the sons of men. He rises to eloquence 
as the sea waves to the lifting of the ships upon their 
towering fronts. A man who, in prison with his wrist 
chained to the wrist of a strange soldier, could dic¬ 
tate sermons whose resounding eloquence has moved 
the world and the centuries, may not be permitted 
through humility to minify his astounding gifts. So 
many preachers require the flint of the congregation 
to strike fire from the steel of their thought. Preacher 
Paul was not so. How much a visible assembly may 
have shot fire through his blood we may not say, but 
that in the solitude of the prison loneliness he could 
look across prison spaces, sea spaces, land stretches, 
and see the faces of an invisible throng, and lift a 
voice which had all the ecstasy of a happy heart and 
a golden mouth preaching to the visible flock—this 
we do know. 

The homiletics of Paul the Apostle may well hold 
our thought. Those who try to preach have reason 
374 


PAUL, THE PREACHER. 

to be students of the first of those men who could 
preach. He did not try to preach; he preached. He 
held the cross. He smote men with the cross. He had 
sat at the feet of Gamaliel as a student in casuistry 
and theological mechanics, but he sat at the feet of 
the martyr with bleeding brow and breast to learn the 
sublime mode of approach. If the student of ser- 
monic art will read Stephen’s sermon before the San¬ 
hedrin and then read such of Paul’s earlier sermons 
as have been reported to us, he will be struck by the 
vivid resemblance. In so far as Paul preached with 
sermonic plan, he was Saint Stephen’s disciple. As 
a matter of happy fact Paul had a habit of striking 
out at tangents from his sermon plan because his re¬ 
ligious experience must be told. If ever the value of 
religious experience as a propagandist of the gospel 
needs enforcing, that enforcement can be had by not¬ 
ing the smiting as of thunderbolts which comes to any 
audience when Paul rehearses his conversion. Paul was 
no purist in sermonic plan, no slave of homiletical out¬ 
line. He was vital, amazed, and like the sea, sublime 
and smote like the avalanche. The dreary teaching 
that all sermons must be constructed after one pattern 
is as insane as to assert that all plants should be alike. 
Every species must be unlike. God is no delighter in 
monotony. He delights in variety. Every text has 
a distinct call to spread forth its own roots and lift 
up its own trunk and toss out its own branches and 
wear its own foliage, and in due season bear its own 
fruit. 

Let Paul now preach for himself, we of course be- 

375 


THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


ing limited to such desultory and compressed reports 
as have come down to us from the pen of such as were 
reporters of the discourse. In many sermonic in¬ 
stances it will be discovered that the reporter has sim¬ 
ply squeezed the juice of the sermon into a cup, and 
the cup is small, but the sermon’s whole must have 
been vivid and compelling, as witness results. 

The Sermon at Antioch in Pisidia. 

Men of Israel, and ye that fear God, give audience. 
The God of this people of Israel chose our fathers, and 
exalted the people when they dwelt as strangers in the 
land of Egypt, and with an high arm brought He them 
out of it. And about the time of forty years suffered 
He their manners in the wilderness. And when He had 
destroyed seven nations in the land of C^anaan, He 
divided their land to them by lot. And after that. He 
gave unto them judges, about the space of four hun¬ 
dred and fifty years, until Samuel the prophet. And 
afterward they desired a king: and God gave unto 
them Saul, the son of Cis, a man of the tribe of Ben¬ 
jamin, by the space of forty years. And when He 
had removed Him, He raised up unto them David to 
be their king; to whom also He gave testimony, and 
said, I have found David the son of Jesse, a man 
after mine own heart, which shall fulfill all My will. 
Of this man’s seed hath God, according to His promise, 
raised unto Israel a Savior, Jesus: When John had 
first preached, before His coming, the baptism of re¬ 
pentance to all the people of Israel. And as John ful¬ 
filled his course, he said. Whom think ye that I am? 
376 


PAUL, THE PREACHER. 


I am not He, But, behold, there cometh One after 
me, whose shoes of His feet I am not worthy to loose. 
Men and brethren, children of the stock of Abraham, 
and whosoever among you feareth God, to you is the 
word of this salvation sent. For they that dwell at 
Jerusalem, and their rulers, because they knew Him 
not, nor yet the voices of the prophets which are read 
every Sabbath day, they have fulfilled them in con¬ 
demning Him, And though they found no cause of 
death in Him, yet desired they Pilate that He should 
be slain. And when they had fulfilled all that was 
written of Him, they took Him down from the tree, 
and laid Him in a sepulcher. But God raised Him 
from the dead. And He was seen many days of them 
which came up with Him from Galilee to Jerusalem, 
who are His witnesses unto the people. And we de¬ 
clared unto you glad tidings, how that the promise 
which was made unto the fathers, God hath fufilled 
the same unto us their children, in that He hath raised 
up Jesus again; as it is also written in the Second 
Psalm, Thou art My Son, this day have I begotten 
Thee. And as concerning that He raised Him up 
from the dead, now no more to return to corruption. 
He said on this wise, I will give you the sure mercies 
of David. Wherefore He saith also in another psalm. 
Thou shalt not suffer Thine Holy One to see corrup¬ 
tion. For David, after he had served his own gen¬ 
eration by the will of God, fell on sleep, and was laid 
unto his fathers, and saw corruption: but He, whom 
God raised again, saw no corruption. Be it known 
unto you therefore, men and brethren, that through 
377 


THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


this Man is preached unto you the forgiveness of sins: 
And by Him all that believe are justified from all 
things, from which ye could not be justified by the 
law of Moses. Beware therefore, lest that come upon 
you, which is spoken of in the prophets; Behold, ye 
despisers, and wonder, and perish: for I work a work 
in your days, a work which ye shall in no wise believe, 
though a man declare it unto you. 

The Sermon at Iconium. 

Sirs, why do ye these things? We also are men 
of like passions with you, and preach unto you, that 
ye should turn from these vanities unto the living God, 
which made heaven, and earth, and the sea, and all 
things that are therein: who in times past suffered all 
nations to walk in their own ways. Nevertheless He left 
not Himself without witness, in that He did good, and 
gave us rain from heaven, and fruitful seasons, filling 
our hearts with food and gladness. 

The Sermon in the Jail at Philippi. 

Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt 
be saved, and thy house. 

The Sermon at Thessalonica. 

Christ must needs have suffered, and risen again 
from the dead; and that this Jesus, whom I preach 
unto you, is Christ. 

The Sermon in Athens on Mars’ Hill. 

Ye men of Athens, I perceive that in all things 
ye are too superstitious. For as I passed by, and be- 
378 


PAUL, THE PREACHER. 


held your devotions, I found an altar with this inscrip¬ 
tion, TO THE UNKNOWN GOD. Whom there¬ 
fore ye ignorantly worship. Him declare I unto you. 
God that made the world and all things therein, see¬ 
ing that He is Lord of heaven and earth, dwelleth 
not in temples made with hands: neither is worshiped 
with men’s hands, as though He needed any thing, see¬ 
ing He giveth to all life, and breath, and all things: 
and hath made of one blood all nations of men for to 
dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined 
the times before appointed, and the bounds of their hab¬ 
itation: that they should seek the Lord, if haply they 
might feel after Him, and find Him, though He be 
not far from every one of us: for in Him we live, 
and move, and have our being; as certain also of your 
own poets have said. For we are also His offspring. 
Forasmuch then as we are the offspring of God, we 
ought not to think that the Godhead is like unto gold, 
or silver, or stone, graven by art and man’s device. 
And the times of this ignorance God winked at; but 
now commandeth all men everywhere to repent: be¬ 
cause He hath appointed a day, in the which He will 
judge the world in righteousness, by that man whom 
He hath ordained; whereof Fie hath given assurance 
unto all men, in that He hath raised Him from the dead. 

The Sermon at Ephesus. 

John verily baptized with the baptism of repent¬ 
ance, saying unto the people, that they should believe 
on Him which should come after him, that is, on Christ 
Jesus. 


379 


THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


The Sermon at Jerusalem on the Stairs of the 
Castle. 

Men, brethren, and fathers, hear ye my defense, 
which I make now unto you. I am verily a man which 
am a Jew, bom in Tarsus, a city of Cilicia, yet brought 
up in this city, at the feet of Gamaliel, and taught 
according to the perfect manner of the law of the 
fathers, and was zealous toward God, as ye all are this 
day. And I persecuted this way unto the death, bind¬ 
ing and delivering into prisons both men and women. 
As also the High Priest doth bear me witness, and all 
the estate of the elders: from whom also I received 
letters unto the brethren, and went to Damascus, to 
bring them which were there bound unto Jerusalem, for 
to be punished. And it came to pass that, as I made 
my journey, and was come nigh unto Damascus about 
noon, suddenly there shone from heaven a great light 
round about me. And I fell unto the ground, and 
heard a voice saying unto me, Saul, Saul, why per- 
secutest thou Me? And I answered. Who art Thou, 
Lord? And He said unto me, I am Jesus of Naza¬ 
reth, whom thou persecutest. And they that were with 
me saw indeed the light, and were afraid; but they 
heard not the voice of Him that spake to me. And I 
said. What shall I do. Lord? And the Lord said unto 
me. Arise, and go into Damascus; and there it shall 
be told thee of all things which are appointed for thee 
to do. And when I could not see for the glory of 
that light, being led by the hand of them that were 
with me, I came into Damascus. And one Ananias, 
a devout man according to the law, having a good re- 
380 


PAUL, THE PREACHER. 


port of all the Jews which dwelt there, came unto me, 
and stood, and said unto me, Brother Saul, receive 
thy sight. And the same hour I looked up upon him. 
And he said. The God of our fathers hath chosen thee, 
that thou shouldest know His will, and see that Just 
One, and shouldest hear the voice of His mouth. For 
thou shalt be His witness unto all men, of what thou 
hast seen and heard. And now, why tarriest thou.^ 
arise, and be baptized, and wash away thy sins, call¬ 
ing on the name of the Lord. And it came to pass, 
• that when I was come again to Jerusalem, even while 
I prayed in the temple, I was in a trance; and saw 
Him saying unto me. Make haste, and get thee quickly 
out of Jerusalem: for they will not receive thy testi¬ 
mony concerning Me. And I said. Lord, they know 
that I imprisoned and beat in every synagogue them 
that believed on Thee: and when the blood of Thy 
martyr Stephen was shed, I also was standing by, and 
consenting unto his death, and kept the raiment of 
them that slew him. And He said unto me. Depart: 
for I will send thee far hence unto the Gentiles. 

The Sermon in the Chief Captain’s Palace. 

Men and brethren, I have lived in all good con¬ 
science before God until this day. 

Men and brethren, I am a Pharisee, the son of a 
Pharisee: of the hope and resurrection of the dead I 
am called in question. 

The Sermon in Felix’s Palace at C^sarea. 

Forasmuch as I know that thou hast been of many 
years a judge unto this nation, I do the more cheer- 
381 


THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


fully answer for myself: because that thou mayest 
understand, that there are yet but twelve days since 
I went up to Jerusalem for to worship. And they 
neither found me in the temple disputing with any 
man, neither raising up the people, neither in the syna¬ 
gogues, nor in the city: neither can they prove the 
things whereof they now accuse me. But this I con¬ 
fess unto thee, that after the way which they call 
heresy, so worship I the God of my fathers, believ¬ 
ing all things which are written in the law and in 
the prophets: and have hope toward God, which they 
themselves also allow, that there shall be a resurrection 
of the dead, both of the just and unjust. And herein 
do I exercise myself, to have always a conscience void 
of offense toward God, and toward men. Now after 
many years I came to bring alms to my nation, and of¬ 
ferings. Whereupon certain Jews from Asia found 
me purified in the temple, neither with multitude, nor 
with tumult. Who ought to have been here before 
thee, and object, if they had aught against me. Or 
else let these same here say, if they have found any 
evil doing in me, while I stood before the council, 
except it be for this one voice, that I cried standing 
among them. Touching the resurrection of the dead 
I am called in question by you this day. 

The Sermon Before Festus in Caesarea. 

Neither against the law of the Jews, neither against 
the temple, nor yet against Caesar, have I offended any¬ 
thing at all. I stand at Caesar’s judgment seat, where 
I ought to be judged: to the Jews have I done no wrong, 
382 


PAUL, THE PREACHER. 


as thou very well knowest. For if I be an offender, 
or have committed anything worthy of death, I refuse 
not to die: but if there be none of these things whereof 
these accuse me, no man may deliver me unto them. I 
appeal unto Caesar. 

The Sermon Before King Agrippa. 

I think myself happy. King Agrippa, because I 
shall answer for myself this day before thee, touch¬ 
ing all the things whereof I am accused of the Jews: 

Especially, because 1 know thee to be expert in 
all customs and questions which are among the Jews: 
wherefore I beseech thee to hear me patiently. My 
manner of life from my youth, which was at the first 
among mine own nation at Jerusalem, know all the 
Jews; which knew me from the beginning, if they would 
testify, that after the most straitest sect of our re¬ 
ligion, I lived a Pharisee. And now I stand and am 
judged for the hope of the promise made of God unto 
our fathers: unto which promise our twelve tribes, in¬ 
stantly serving God day and night, hope to come. For 
which hope’s sake. King Agrippa, I am accused of the 
Jews. Why should it be thought a thing incredible 
with you, that God should raise the dead? I verily 
thought with myself, that I ought to do many things 
contrary to the name of Jesus of Nazareth. Which 
thing I also did in Jerusalem: and many of the saints 
did I shut up in prison, having received authority 
from the chief priests; and when they were put to 
death, I gave my voice against them. And I punished 
them oft in every synagogue, and compelled them to 
383 


THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 

blaspheme: and being exceedingly mad against them, 
I persecuted them even unto strange cities. Where¬ 
upon as I went to Damascus, with authority and com¬ 
mission from the chief priests, at midday, 0 king, I 
saw in the way a light from heaven, above the bright¬ 
ness of the sun, shining round about me and them 
which journeyed with me. And when we were all fallen 
to the earth, I heard a voice speaking unto me, 
and saying in the Hebrew tongue, Saul, Saul, 
why persecutest thou Me.^ And I said. Who art 
Thou, Lord? And He said, I am Jesus whom 

thou persecutest. But rise, and stand upon thy 
feet: for I have appeared unto thee for this pur¬ 
pose, to make thee a minister and a witness both 
of these things which thou hast seen, and of those 
things in the which I will appear unto thee; delivering 
thee from the people, and from the Gentiles, unto whom 
now I send thee, to open their eyes, and to turn them 
from darkness to light, and from the power of Satan 
unto God, that they may receive forgiveness of sins, 
and inheritance among them which are sanctified by 
faith that is in Me. Whereupon, O King Agrippa, I 
was not disobedient unto the heavenly vision: but shewed 
first unto them of Damascus, and at Jerusalem, and 
throughout all the coasts of Judaea, and then to the 
Gentiles, that they should repent and turn to God, and 
do works meet for repentance. For these causes the 
Jews caught me in the temple, and went about to kill 
me. Having therefore obtained help of God, I con¬ 
tinue unto this day, witnessing both to small and great, 
saying none other things than those which the prophets 
384 


PAUL, THE PREACHER. 


and Moses did say should come: That Christ should 
suffer, and that He should be the first that should rise 
from the dead, and should shew light unto the people, 
and to the Gentiles. And as he thus spake for himself, 
Festus said with a loud voice, Paul, thou art beside 
thyself; much learning doth make thee mad. But he 
said, I am not mad, most noble Festus; but speak forth 
the words of truth and soberness. For the king know- 
eth of these things, before whom also I speak freely: 
for I am persuaded that none of these things are hid¬ 
den from him; for this thing was not done in a corner. 
King Agrippa, believest thou the prophets I know 
that thou believest. 

The Sermon on Shipboard. 

And now I exhort you to be of good cheer: for 
there shall be no loss of any man's life among you, but 
of the ship. For there stood beside me this night the 
angel of God, whose I am, and whom I serve, saying. 
Fear not, Paul; thou must be brought before Caesar: 
and, lo, God hath given thee all them that sail with 
thee. Wherefore, sirs, be of good cheer: for I believe 
God, that it shall be even as it was told me. Howbeit 
we must be cast upon a certain island. 

The Sermon at Rome in Paul’s Own Hired House. 

He expounded and testified the kingdom of God, 
persuading them concerning Jesus, both out of the 
law of Moses, and out of the prophets. Well spake 
the Holy Ghost by Esaias the prophet unto our 
fathers, saying. Go unto this people, and say, Hear- 
26 385 


THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


ing ye shall hear, and shall not understand; and 
seeing ye shall see, and not perceive: for the heart of 
this people is waxed gross, and their ears are dull of 
hearing, and their eyes have they closed; lest they 
should see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and 
understand with their heart, and should be converted, 
and I should heal them. Be it known therefore unto 
you, that the salvation of God is sent unto the Gentiles, 
and that they will hear it. 

Compare Preacher Stephen’s interrupted sermon 
and Preacher Paul’s first sermon. Preacher Stephen’s 
sermon as reported in Acts, chapter seven, is elementally 
historical. It repeats the history of Israel before Is¬ 
rael’s eyes, beginning with Abraham in Mesopotamia 
and crowding on, squeezing the main lessons from Is¬ 
rael’s moral delinquencies and climbing on into his ex¬ 
position of race history to the dedication of the temple 
and lifting into noble eloquence which seems spontane¬ 
ous. To all such as contemplate the God of the temple, 
the houseless God having been given a house, Stephen 
says that Israel’s God could not be housed. He was 
above all He had made—then there is a hiatus in the 
sermon and it lacks a climax which one greatly needs to 
speed us to Stephen’s intended attack upon the hearts 
of his auditors. But what we have in Verses 51 and 
53—“Ye stiffnecked and uncircumcised in heart and 
ears, ye do always resist the Holy Ghost: as your 
fathers did, so do ye. Which of the prophets have 
not your fathers persecuted and they have slain them 
which shewed before of the coming of the Just One; 
386 


PAUL, THE PREACHER. 


of whom ye have been now the betrayers and mur¬ 
derers: who have received the law by the disposition 
of angels, and have not kept it”—^was an invective 
against unbelieving Israel which we may readily un¬ 
derstand would snarl the already hostile audience into 
frenzy; and so it did, and so the sermon had no con¬ 
clusion save in the closing word, sweeter than sermons 
know to close, the word of forgiveness and the smiling 
his way out into the kingdom of Christ. And Stephen 
himself and Stephen’s death were the conclusion of 
Stephen’s sermon. 

But this very anger and clamor, this fury of anger 
against a man standing solitary, put a barb into the 
heart of Saul of Tarsus. The preacher is dead; but 
his words are like the swing of a gigantic sword in 
gigantic hands, and hack and cut and never ceases 
till Stephen’s Christ has His way with the young Jew¬ 
ish zealot. The similarity between Stephen’s sermon 
and Paul’s discourse has ever seemed to me one of 
the most thrilling psychological episodes printed in 
biography. Perhaps I ought to say the most thrill¬ 
ing; but we may not fear to affirm that Stephen’s 
words hack on uninterruptedly by day and dark. He 
had great audience, that dying man. He was to win 
a convert to the Christ; and for one such convert as 
Saul of Tarsus a preacher might afford to die after 
one sermon. Are we familiar with any other instance 
of preaching which had greater conquest.? I have often 
wondered if Saint Stephen knows what divine fruitage 
his broken sermon bore that day. 

In Acts thirteen is set down only in a sort of dim 

387 


THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


outline Paul’s first attempt at preaching. It is a his¬ 
torical sermon. It begins even as Stephen’s, only it, 
with Pauline haste, passes over the patriarchs, glances 
at Egyptian slavery, flashes past four hundred years, 
looks in the eyes of the battles of Joshua and the rule 
of the Judges and the setting up of the kingdom and 
having come to David, with a leap like the light passes 
from David to David’s Christ. 

And then Paul the preacher was at home. He has 
come to Christ, where all his preaching found its shin¬ 
ing destination and its abundant peace. But enough 
is said to see that Stephen had left impress on Paul. 
How Stephen climbed into the citadel of Paul was how 
Paul climbed into the citadel of other souls. Cer¬ 
tainly, it is apparent, too, that the further he receded 
from Stephen the less was Stephen’s influence upon 
him and the more did he become himself, though, not¬ 
withstanding in the preaching of many epistles, there 
is from time to time the magnificent encroachment of 
the holy martyr’s sermon plan. Notably so in Romans. 
Romans I take to be a production where, though the 
march was Paul’s, the route was Stephen’s. View 
Romans as a sermon, for such it is, and then compare 
this with Stephen’s sermon and mark the similarity. 
Follow the track of Stephen’s interrupted eloquence 
and the similarity is striking. A historical sermon 
plan, the appeal to Hebrew history, it has a might of 
movement, which is seen to be Pauline, as it leaps up¬ 
ward with spurts of eloquence when his heart is given 
chance by its hand to mold history into soul stuff. 

What preacher has not dreamed of that discourse 

388 


PAUL, THE PREACHER. 

at Ephesus, when Paul preached from gloom at night 
till dawn at morning, interrupted only by a death and 
a resurrection and a resurrection service? Save the 
sermon of Jesus, there is not in the history of the 
Christian Church one a body would so love to have 
heard. His farewell sermon, concluding with that 
strangely pathetic, “Ye shall see my face no more”— 
no more—wherein love was tyrant with their hearts 
and held them in its tearful hand, was such a sermon 
as one might have given half a life to hear. We shall 
gather, though, how the sermon swept on and swept 
them away. I wonder if that night of the farewell 
sermon at Ephesus he could have preached the most 
thrilling sermon since Jesus created resurrection, which 
we read in First Corinthians, Chapter XV, what a night 
it would have been to have heard that majestic ser¬ 
mon from the heart of him who had beheld the risen 
Savior yet as one bom out of due time. Or did he 
preach the first of Colossians on the eternity of Jesus 
on the text, “Before Abraham was, I am?” Or did he 
preach the encomium on faith and the diatribe against 
works; and as the sermon advances the words were 
such, as when reported, scorched the page; and did 
he preach all the night, and the night was too short 
to brainy listeners? for such eloquence they shall 
not hear again. When Whitefield, one night—^his 
death night — holding his bedroom candle in his 
hand, paused on the stairs to preach a brief good¬ 
night sermon to his host, the candle light in his hand 
lighting his face like a halo, and his words were sweet, 
and then a good-night, and then the candle climbed 
389 


THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


the stairs; and the most eloquent man of the eighteenth 
century lay down to sleep, to wake not at the morn¬ 
ing. That sermon grips the imagination. We see it 
all, but can not, more the pity, hear it at all. Yet 
what a diluted sermon—sermon and preacher lesser 
regalities—when we watch Paul “doulos” of Jesus 
Christ, by the grace of God, preaching amid smoking 
lamps, the dim light sometimes flashing grotesque shad¬ 
ows, preaching, preaching on from dark to dawn. 
Would we had heard that sermon! 

Now, listening to Preacher Paul’s recorded sermons, 
remembering that they are at best mere outlines, for 
stenography, even if Tiro, freedman to Cicero, in¬ 
vented it, was not in common use then. They were 
reported from memory and were written down in an 
Anabasis which knew no spaces for lengthy orations 
such as Thucydides loved to place in his histories. Luke 
was like Xenophon in the Anabasis, who keeps the army 
on the march, ten parasangs, eight parasangs, halts, 
then battles, then more parasangs, march, march, bat¬ 
tle, conquest, march, advance, anabasis, retire, and then 
katabasis—^the retreat of the ten thousand! Luke’s 
Anabasis of the gospel has no katabasis, only move 
upward, outward, march, preacher, march, but the 
march is everything. The Acts is not a book of homi¬ 
letics; it is a book of battle and proceeding with swift 
attempt to keep sight of the advancing Christ, 

Paul’s pulpits were a jail cell, a castle stair in 
Jerusalem, an upper room, a king’s palace, a Mars’ 
Hill, a sea front proseucha, and a ship’s deck tossing 
in tumultuous storm. John Huss preached from a stake 
390 


PAUL, THE PREACHER. 


when the flames were leaping on him like hungry yel¬ 
low lions. ’T was a glorious pulpit where angry waves 
of fire can not cause the sermon to cease, though it 
did cause the preacher to cease. But Paul the preacher 
has pre-eminence in variety of pulpits, from beside a 
fire made for shipwrecked men out of wet sticks, while 
a viper from the fire is clinging with poisoned fangs to 
his hand, to a headman’s block under the bent, illumined 
sky where he prayed, I doubt me not, like his great 
master prayed time since, “Lord Jesus, into Thy hands 
I commend my spirit. Amen.” and then fell asleep— 
Paul catches our imagination and will not let it go. 
Brother Saul, preaching or remaining silent, we are 
thy auditors. Have thy way; and thy way shall be 
ours. 

And the Eleventh of Hebrews seems strangely Paul¬ 
ine to my heart. I do not now argue whether Hebrews 
be Pauline in origin or not. The matter is indifferent. 
Some great preacher wrote it. It is Stephen-Paul’s 
plan, but if sometime in his ministerial career Preacher 
Paul did not give the roll call of faith, sometime, some¬ 
where I miss my guess. This apostle of salvation, not 
by works, but by faith, namely, by the sheer gratuity 
of God, should have, would have, and did somewhere 
at some time rhapsodize on faith. This, I will risk, 
is that rhapsody. It is like him; it is worthy of him. 
The rhapsodist of love in the Thirteenth of Corinth¬ 
ians is competent for this rhapsody of faith. Where 
shall such sermons smite upon our souls as the XI of 
Hebrews and the XV of First Corinthians and the 
XHI of First Corinthians.? 

391 


THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


When audiences saw the renowned preacher, Paul, 
they looked on a small man with inflamed eyes, which 
probably squinted in the light, inasmuch as we read in 
a certain place, “Paul looked on him earnestly”—Paul 
trying to see him, peering at him, as may be reason¬ 
ably inferred. He was given to gesticulation, being’ 
both emphatic and nervous. He often preluded his 
words with gestures, as a body may read at almost any 
preaching service of his, his hands were much in evi¬ 
dence. “Paul stretched forth his hand.” 

His pulpits, as we have noticed, were varied and 
romantic. To picture them before the imagination, is 
to thrill us, even if we hear no word the preacher 
spoke. 

He was an itinerant, a sort of Methodist preacher 
brother. Watch him in his far-goings. The three 
capitals of the world in Paul’s time were Rome, Athens, 
and Jerusalem. Rome, capital of government; Athens, 
capital of culture; Jerusalem, capital of religion, both 
Judaism and Christianity. And Paul, “the Roman 
citizen and traveler,” to use the title of Ramsay’s great 
book, kept these three cities steadily in his view, espe¬ 
cially Jerusalem and Rome. He was so much a Roman 
citizen himself, being, as he told the captain, not a 
citizen by purchase, but being free-born, that he felt 
the entire world of his day was a Roman world. “I 
appeal unto Caesar,” was the passport he gives himself 
to bring him to the world’s legal capital. Many pulpits 
but one gospel, yet one gospel proclaimed with ref¬ 
erence to combating the local unbeliefs and creating 
and catching local attention. We have heard him 
392 


PAUL, THE PREACHER. 


preach in Judea, Cyprus, Malta, Greece, Italy, Damas¬ 
cus, Arabia. His longest reported pastorates were at 
Ephesus and Rome. In Ephesus he preached, going 
about freely from house to house, exercising his pas¬ 
toral function as well as his preaching function, for 
two years, and in Rome, a prisoner, and confined in his 
own hired house, he preached for a period of two years, 
and how long he may have preached in the Roman 
dungeon we are not apprised, but safely may say that 
his longest pastorate was in the capital of the world. 
He had caught the parable of the sower who went 
forth to sow and was the mighty marching evangelist 
sowing beside all waters and on every barren hilltop. 

He was well read in the Bible, both Old Testa¬ 
ment and New Testament. Hebrew history he knew 
by heart, and could repeat and interpret, and the New 
Testament; namely, the doings of the Christ, he knew 
full well, having searched every corner and housetop 
for familiarity with facts that bore upon his won¬ 
drous Master, Christ. And Doctor Luke, Paul’s fam¬ 
ily physician, made a scholarly research under the 
guidance of Preacher Paul into the sources of the Chris¬ 
tian Church. Paul knew: he had been Christ’s bit¬ 
terest foe: he was now Christ’s stanchest friend. “I 
know whom I have believed.” Paul had no hearsay 
Christ, but after his personal meeting with the Savior, 
as “one born out of due time,” to use his own very 
graphic phrase, he spent three years in Arabia perfect¬ 
ing himself in the lore of the Christ. Paul the preacher 
made what was probably the first written contribution 
to the New Testament canon, and wrote and spoke 
393 


THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


with such radiant hope and sure assurance, because he 
knew the Christ and had gone whithersoever the print 
of Christ’s naked and bleeding foot was on the earth. 
Paul is, up to now, the greatest personal credential 
of the gospel. His conversion to Christianity and his 
apostolate of Christianity remain irrefutable arguments 
for the fact of the Christ from incarnation of Bethle¬ 
hem through crucifixion at Calvary and through res¬ 
urrection from the grave in the garden beside the cross' 
to His session from the Mount, called Olivet. “And 
was seen last of all by me also,” rings out with a tri¬ 
umph peal, which stirs the blood even unto now. Paul’s 
theological training was of three years’ duration in 
Arabia, of which period we can do little more than 
dream, howbeit we may greatly dream. He studied 
hard; he studied long; he knew the preacher ought 
to be prepared. Possibly the theological course with 
Christ which the other disciples had had, three and a 
half gracious and glorious years, appealed to Paul’s 
imagination and sense of fitness. In any case, three 
years he disappears from the landscape of activity, 
but when he came to preach, the Bible was so at the 
tip of his tongue and the facts of Holy Writ were so 
absolutely his possession, that he proceeds to dictate 
to an amanuensis a larger part of the New Testament 
that was to be. Those three lost years in Arabia, 
those years of disappearance are to be reckoned with 
in the eventful ministry of the greatest preacher the 
world has had, save only Jesus of Nazareth, and the 
greatest man the Roman world has caught sight of, 
not excluding Caesar, perpetual dictator. 

394 


PAUL, THE PREACHER. 


Paul was extemporaneous. 

A man who could with his dim eyes, holden in his 
hands, dictate I Corinthians, was plainly the prince of 
extemporaneous orators. I know of only one flight of 
extemporaneity to be named alongside it; namely, Mil- 
ton, with his blind eyes looking dead ahead and ex¬ 
temporizing the flawless rhythm and noblest poem of 
the English tongue. But his “Paradise Lost” and 
“Paradise Regained” are not majestical as Paul’s epis¬ 
tles. The greater poet was Paul; and the greater 
preacher was Paul, although John Milton must be reck¬ 
oned as one of the supreme preachers of the ages. His 
stern gospel stirs us yet, and his abundant eloquence 
bears us away now, as it must have borne the Puritans 
away then. God was very real to John Milton, poet. 
The mighty extemporaneous preacher is Paul. He took 
his stand in the mob of the howling city of Jerusalem, 
or in the fury of the city of Iconium, or in Thessa- 
lonica, or in Philippi, no matter where, and “spoke 
forth” the words of truth and soberness. And can 
we find a finer phrasing for extemporaneous oratory 
than Paul’s “speak forth.” 

His eyes were squinting in scanning the face of 
the throng. He would have seen them if he could, 
and though he could not, his sense of personal appeal 
fixed his habit of looking about from face to face, as 
searching hearts to recognize them for his Christ. This, 
I take it, is why Paul makes such frequent remark 
on his thorn in the flesh. He so hungrily wanted to 
see men’s faces for Jesus’ sake as that his inability 
to do so thrust him through with a dart. He knew 
395 


THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


the value of the eye lit with the gospel light, tracing 
the faces of the listening throng and wanted, O wanted, 
to see, and could not, and sobbed, “A thorn in the 
flesh, a messenger of Satan sent to buflPet me.’’ And 
then he halted his sobbing with a shout—“His grace 
shall be sufficient for me.” 

Paul was spontaneous. 

You felt his lips were rioting in consonance with his 
brain and heart. He was not stereotyped. He was 
free. He went, not by memory, but by occasion. He 
leaps sudden as a rainbow on a cloud and as beautiful. 
A radiant effortlessness, as of the light at dawn, was 
on him. He commands us to forget it was hard work 
to preach. It looks so easy when Paul was doing it. 
He did not display his tense muscles; he contented him¬ 
self with that larger muscularity of a dead lift of 
power. 

Paul was vivid. 

He was never prosaic. He made audiences take 
heed. He blinded their eyes with his tropic sun. He 
chained their wrists by his iron grip. He ran with 
such speed, as that to keep pace with him, listeners 
panted nigh spent of breath. He coined words; he 
used big words; he spun onward like a star; he used 
sesquipedalian words, to which Horace pays his ad¬ 
dresses, and little words, and caught at the word or 
phrase which could portray the thing he had in his 
brain and heart. He had the feeling that rhetoric and 
lexicon and grammar were to be servants and not mas¬ 
ters, and so was as autocratic with them as Shakespeare. 
The prim body would sit in the audience and criticise 
396 


PAUL, THE PREACHER. 


Paul; the large soul sat in the audience and pent up 
hallelujahs in their hearts to shout in future days. 
Paul was a Roman, and hattle-mooded. 

He was city bom and bred. So city incidents shape 
his intellectual approach. His vocabulary was not pug¬ 
nacious, although Paul himself was a pugnacious self. 
Pugnacity is the weak side of virility. Paul quar¬ 
reled with Barnabas, son of consolation, and you can 
fairly see the blood scald his face in his spirit of pug¬ 
nacious fury; but you know Paul was no feminine gen¬ 
der. His masculine intelligence was always evident. 
The public games delighted him; the entire muscu¬ 
larity of soldiering made his red blood torrential. Coun¬ 
try life had scant suggestion in his phrasing or in 
his thinking, but city manners and battle customs ap¬ 
pealed to every fiber of his energy; and he was fierce 
dynamics done up in a small compass. You could re¬ 
cite the entire military paraphernalia from hearing Paul 
preach. We wrestle not with flesh and blood, but with 
principalities and powers, there is the athlete for you. 
“Fight the good fight of faith,” and then the reci¬ 
tation of the parts of the battle harness, piece by 
piece; and the battle is on and the charge and the 
rush and the biting of swords on brazen helmets when 
Preacher Paul is in the pulpit. 

Paul was a practical preacher. 

Mystic that Paul was he yet not the less, but rather 
the more saw that every-day duties were seasonable 
and reasonable. Paul came as near to setting hum¬ 
drum work to music as has ever been done. The XII 
of Romans is really a catalogue of ethical, practical, 
397 


THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


daily, homely suggestions and advice, and yet where 
do we light upon more interesting discourse? It is 
hardly possible to believe that we have been listening 
to good advices when we hear him in that chapter. 
When we come to make inquisition as to why those 
customary lowly things have not seemed stale as if cus¬ 
tomary, neither humdrum as lowly things do appeal 
to us as being, we shall discover it was because he 
makes all these minor things segments of the phenomenal 
circle, even the circle of eternity. No preacher is more 
practical than Paul, and no man more mystical. 

Paul was experimental. 

He is familiar with the appeal the experience of 
one man makes to the mind of all men. I would have 
loved to hear that preacher give his experience at an 
experience meeting in the presence of Felix or of Fes- 
tus and to have beheld the psychologic wonder of that 
personal experience upon his auditors. I have noticed 
it so many times and on such diverse occasions that 
when a Christian experience was being declared by 
Christians of any age or clime, be he layman or min¬ 
ister, woman or man, or little child, it had telling ef¬ 
fect. When a theology is a system it may appear 
cold and remote; but when it is put into flesh and 
blood in the person of the one having the theory so 
incarnated, it becomes “mighty to the pulling down 
of strongholds.” When all has been told, the mightiest 
preaching, when weighed in the balance of effect, is 
personal experience—“God hath in Christ done this in 
me,” says the sobbing or the singing; and there will 
be sobbings and singings more than his. A Christian 
398 


PAUL, THE PREACHER. 


experience told by an illiterate, ungrammatical, uncon- 
trovertibly ignorant speech will melt a company, ora¬ 
tors and thinkers, into profound attention and even 
into tears. This is so. The why is not far to seek. 
We are at the depths of us not brains, but hearts. 
We must all quarry at the quarry men call life. That 
struggle is identical in the ranges of humanity. When 
Preacher Paul swung out on his experience of the 
resurrection of Jesus, there were angry mob, violence, 
white faces of fear, red faces of hostility, but always 
attention, never inattention. “Christ hath wrought 
this for me. He hath upheld me when human uphold¬ 
ing failed or ceased.” We can not argue much against 
that nor about it. When Paul’s experimental sermon 
plunges on like a mountain stream, where the angle 
of declination is steep, then, through the centuries’ re¬ 
move, I can not refrain from feeling that torrential 
majesty. He sweeps me down as if I were a futile pine 
branch on the torrent. Paul had seen Christ, had had 
Christ; bore in his “body marks of the Lord Jesus 
Christ.” Let me meet his Christ. 

Paul knew the Holy Ghost, 

He knew the Spirit of adoption whereby we cry, 
Abba, Father. He knew the inner light, which is the 
Holy Ghost witnessing to our spirits that we are the 
children of God. He knew the Comforter, named by 
Paul, “The Spirit of His Son.” He knew the witness 
of a good conscience. He knew the Holy Ghost was 
the God of good order and kindness and love, and not 
of clamors, riot, and physical and metaphysical con¬ 
fusion, which many would do well to learn from him. 
399 


THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


Paul had mighty faith. 

Walking by faith, with him, meant walking by 
daylight. He could trust where he could not see. He 
knew that faith was the roadway for the salvation of 
God. He looked all hostilities to God in the eyes, and 
in his eyes you might have divined a look of commis¬ 
eration. To him they stood so surely doomed to die. 
Rome did not abash him. He used it and its roads 
and its laws and its language, used it as he would use a 
vessel to sail the seas. He felt Rome would have no 
emperor some remote day, for he felt utterly safe that 
Christ would be its Emperor some day. 

have but faith, we can not know, 

For knowledge is of things we see,’* 

is what the laureate poet said; but Paul, while he would 
have agreed with the poet’s psychological distinction, 
would have avoided the poet’s emphasis, would even 
have overturned it. To Paul, faith wrought knowl¬ 
edge, as witness, “Henceforth there is laid up for me 
a crown of righteousness, which Christ shall give me 
in that day,” or, “To depart and be with Christ, which 
is far better.” For faith was not in Paul’s preach¬ 
ing or in Paul’s thinking (and the thinking and the 
preaching of Paul were identical) a clouded sky. Glory 
as of a rising day was on Paul’s faith. Paul’s faith 
was a contagion, so that you caught faith from him. 

PauVs heart was hot. 

His was no brain, cold and flowerless, like Calvin’s, 
but his brain was set close against his heart; and in 
his heart dwelt Christ. Where Christ dwells, the tropics 
400 


PAUL, THE PREACHER. 


stay. Across all the highlands of his thought blew 
the blessed, strong wind which wakens the May apple 
and the apple blossoms and redeems a world from 
death. Paul loved Christ so immensely and so com¬ 
pletely that he loved a world, Gentile and Jew. That 
love of his taught him theology. He first among the 
disciples saw clearly that Christ came for the redeem¬ 
ing of the entire world, and though heretofore the 
Jewish race had been the chosen people of the Lord, 
now since the life and death of Christ, all races were 
the Israel of God. The heartless can not be good 
theologians. You can not theologize when your heart 
is at zero. “Who loved me and gave Himself for 
me.” That was Paul’s personal experience of the love 
of God. “Who loved us and gave Himself for us,” 
was his generalization of the love of God. In both 
conclusions he was right. 

Paul was at home in great themes. 

Great men are. The sea itself, gigantic, endur¬ 
ing, alarming, is all that will satisfy your majestical 
soul, and Paul was so. He walked among things 
which angels desired to look into, and spoke on them 
with a hushed voice and bowed head, but spoke on, 
spoke on, then stayed with them, faltered over those 
mysteries, for without controversy “Great is the mys¬ 
tery of godliness.” He was not dismayed by that; 
he did not, as many preachers do, try to reduce to a 
dull level the immeasurable domain of the Christian 
system. “I will gaze at this very high mountain of 
Redemption,” said Preacher Paul; and he did, and we 
bless God that he did. We may do the like, and 
26 401 


THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


ought to do the like, and must do the like if we preach 
after the manner of Brother Paul. 

Paul was given to eagle flights of eloquence. 

It was no marvel with Paul to soar above the 
clouds; he had to do it. It was in him. He was built 
for it. Why should he help it.?^ It is hard to love 
God and man and remain ineloquent. The other night 
I was, as my wont is, watching the sunset skies at 
afterglow; and sunset was a past tense. The flame 
had gone from the paling cloud which had warmed 
its hands at the sunset. Then there came a slow, sure 
increase of splendor and glory of crimson, such as 
I, a watcher of the clouds for a lifetime, had seen 
not more than twice in my life—a splendor as if iron 
were mixed in that blood, with the iron set on flame. 
The sun was reminding the world of his exceeding 
glory now even that he was long since set. 

So with this Pauline eloquence. Its glory stays. 
We see the crimson splendors which know not how to 
pale. A thousand conflagrations are in Paul’s ser¬ 
mons. At midwinter we glow with the heat of sum¬ 
mer standing before his fire. He “being dead, yet 
speaketh.” The audacity of his flights of thought and 
love and words are on us now, and shall be on us ever. 

“Let us put on the armor of light.” Amen. 

“Paul, a preacher of Jesus Christ, will preach here 
to-night. Let us all turn out.” And the house will 
be filled at early candle light. 


402 


“The Lord Is My Pastor.” 


^ ^^Kvptos 'troLfmcvei /ac.” — T/ie Septuagint, 

David, Poet Laureate for religion, has written a 
song. This is his laureate poem. If there be a sweeter 
one written by any poet, certain it is, none ever penned 
was read by so many, loved by so many, leaned on 
by so many. Sometimes a single floating spar tells 
of a wrecked ship. So one floating phrase tells of a 
life which otherwise had been clearly forgotten. One 
psalm fluting from a poet heart, will serve to keep his 
memory young while earth endures. This Shepherd 
Psalm is such. Poet David can stay. Nobody but 
will want his company after this. 

Bums comes among us with his laverock note and 
his plowed-up daisy flower; and he may sit down. He 
is wanted here. He is rural. The smell of the new- 
plowed field is on his garments; the clean dirt of the 
plowing is on his hands. The page on which is writ¬ 
ten “The Daisy” is punctuated with ink-spots of the 
earth out of which the daisy grew. Bums has the 
plow breath in his song and the plow soil on his feet; 
and you may settle to it that the world loves the plow¬ 
man and his field ridged with the windows of fresh- 
tumed soil. 

Poet David, come and stay. You have brought 

403 


THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


a nosegay for the heart. You have seen many things. 
You have remembered all you saw. You bring us mem¬ 
ory of the far fields, and the Bethlehem hills, and the 
bleating lambs, and the anxious mothers, and the swift 
green of pastures wet with dew, and fresh winds blow¬ 
ing gently at evening and at morn, and the shepherd 
with his rod and staff. You have written a pastoral 
poem which puts Theocritus to defeat. That lark of 
Greece never caroled like this. 

Poet David has written a poem for the heart. And 
can we wonder.? Have we not seen what a roomy 
heart he had.? Men competent for heartbreak are com¬ 
petent for poetry. Heartbreak is poetry. All who 
practice poetry may not be able to write poetry. David 
can do both, and has done both. He has gotten things 
by heart. To him, as to all poets, the pungent ap¬ 
peal was the heart appeal. The logicians may out¬ 
argue the poets, though the poets convince us as the 
logicians fail to do. 

Often as a preacher, I have asked varying com¬ 
panies of Christians what portion of Scripture was 
their favorite; and so very many have answered: “The 
Shepherd Psalm.” And why.? Because it was the an¬ 
swer for the heart. Heart-hunger is there writ down, 
[t is David’s heart which is out upon the hills. He 
is out looking for a Heart-Shepherd. He is out; and 
the Heart-Shepherd has come out to him. A heart 
at rest is what makes the Shepherd Psalm so calm. The 
Shepherd and his one lost lamb—aye, the Shepherd and 
his whole glad flock. The psalm says: “My heart, thy 
Shepherd is God: fret not, nor fear. No now nor then 
404 


‘‘THE LORD IS MY PASTOR.” 


holds any loss to thee. Thou art safeguarded against 
the stress of winter weather and the burning heat of 
any tropic day. By night, by day, thy safety is as¬ 
sured. Thou hast no need to bleat like a lost lamb, 
motherless. Thou hast no need to keep an all-night 
vigil against the prowling lion and shambling bear. 
Thou hast a Shepherd, and His name is God.” 

We call this poem a psalm; and we do well. Psalm 
it is. It sings itself. You need no tune to be set; 
for the poem is its own melody. Read this poem you 
can not: sing this poem you must. I hear the dream¬ 
ing of David’s harp. I hear the drip and drip of its 
exquisite and tearful tune. I hear the hum of David’s 
voice, harp and voice at song; and leaning to catch the 
tune and words, I hear: 

The Lord is my Shepherd; I shall not want. 

He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: 

He leadeth me beside the still waters. 

He restoreth my soul: He leadeth me in the 
paths of righteousness for His name’s sake. 

Yea, though I walk through the valley of the 
shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for Thou 
art with me; Thy rod and Thy staff they com¬ 
fort me. 

Thou preparest a table before me in the pres¬ 
ence of mine enemies : Thou anointest my head 
with oil; my cup runneth over. 

Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all 
the days of my life; and I will dwell in the 
house of the Lord forever. 

405 


THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


So soon ended, sweet poet-musician.? Sing it again. 
End not so soon. We answer to thy wonder-call. You 
bring a sob into our throats and triumph into our 
hearts. Sing, sing once again, “The Lord is my Shep¬ 
herd.” Not all the lyrics in “The Princess,” although 
those songs are dreamy sweet, are as sweet as this lau¬ 
reate lyric of David. The song of the Shepherd. 

And is this not strange, that in this poem, writ¬ 
ten by a warrior king, there is no hint of kingship or 
soldiery.? No clash of arms, no tinsel of a crown. 
Life grows too big for remembering things like that 
when it enters into the presence of the Shepherd. 
There is a word of enemies, and there is an anointing 
the head with oil in remembrance, doubtless, of the day 
when from the sheepfield Samuel summoned the ruddy 
lad and poured the coronation oil upon his abundant 
locks of gold; but through all there is the breath and 
memory of the sheep and shepherding. David, king, 
furrowed with care and cut deep with the sword of 
mighty achievings, harks back to the shepherd boy, and 
the harp, and the flock, and the sunlight on the meadow, 
and the quiet stream where waters murmured not at 
noon, but fell fast asleep like a shepherd boy in the 
sun. Had Poet David written a kingly ode, the few 
would have read it. He has written a quiet pastoral; 
and it is read by all the world. 

This poem rests the heart like a touch of prairie 
wind. The king’s court and the obsequious throng, 
and the rush of battle, and its hazard and victory, for¬ 
got, forgot! They have slipped away like rain down 
a leaning sheaf. The sheep and the Shepherd. The 
406 


“THE LORD IS MY PASTOR.” 


Shepherd and His sheep. No want anywhere. Quiet 
everywhere. Balm by dark or day. The leading in the 
holy paths of righteousness. The independency of foe, 
so that there is sitting down at a spread table where 
the foes are thick. The valley of the shadow of death 
shined across by the Shepherd’s presence; the calm 
comfort of His rod and staff—they comfort me. 

Goodness and mercy following while the Shepherd 
goes ahead; and then the dwelling in the house of 
the Lord forever. The Shepherd and the sheep, 
folded and at peace. 


407 


Christ, The Good Pastor. 

’Eyo) elfu 6 iroi/x'^v 6 koXos. —Greek Testament. 

Ego sum Pastor bonus .—The Vulgate. 

The Tenth of John is a poem. It is Christ’s rendi¬ 
tion of the Twenty-third Psalm. In that poem, far- 
known and sung because of its enchanting melody, a 
king tells how God has shepherded his soul. It has the 
willowy note of a wild bird’s call. In life, in death, God 
has him in His care and will provide him with a house 
with Him forever. That is the meaning of the Psalm. 
And it must thrill the hearts of all such as love God 
to see how Jesus in this New Testament poem identifies 
Himself with the Shepherd of this Old Testament psalm. 

The Twenty-third Psalm flows like a gentle river 
where it nears the sea, the quiet waters nigh fallen 
asleep. This Twenty-third Psalm of the New Testa¬ 
ment has the sound of tears in its flowing. Tears are 
raining in the dark, you think, as you listen to the flow 
of this blessed river. 

The Shepherd is here—may be set down as the im¬ 
plication of Jesus. I can never other than believe that 
in this passing sweetness of this Shepherd proclamation 
Jesus has consciously the Shepherd Psalm in mind. So 
that, as we study this, let us keep in thought the psalm 
whose emendation this Christ of ours is come to earth 
408 


CHRIST THE GOOD PASTOR. 


to be. “The Lord is my Shepherd,” says the psalm: 
“I am the good Shepherd,” says the Christ. The Shep¬ 
herd is come. He of whom the old, glad poet sang has 
come out along the hills. He is from Bethlehem. He 
is tramping the hills across the world looking for the 
lost sheep and caring for the sheep not lost. Look, 
eyes of ours, on the blessed, blessed Shepherd. 

The dominant idea in the Shepherd Psalm is the 
care of God. God is alive and well and, hence, gives 
room. He is caring for His own. He is keeping him 
from want. He is spreading his table. He is pouring 
into his cup till the cup spills over, being more than 
full: though a man wander down into the valley of 
the shadow of death, he fears no evil; for God, the Shep¬ 
herd, is with him, and His rod and His staff comfort. 
There is neither fear nor want where God is Shepherd. 
No want here, and no want forever. There is not in 
that beautiful psalm any thought that God might in 
His shepherding grow tired or com,e to His death. 
Never once did that cloud cross the sun of help to that 
singing heart. 

Just here does the Shepherd Psalm of Christ tune 
its melody. The Shepherd is after the lost sheep. That 
is a thought the older poem has no hint of. That is 
the psalm of the shielded sheep, those close against the 
Shepherd’s care. But the lost sheep—that was ever 
the burden of Jesus’ thought and plan and love. The 
straying and the lost, the broken and the faint, the 
storm-girt and the snarled,—^these are those in the mind 
of Christ. The thief bites like winter’s wind in this 
psalm—“the thieP’ and “the robber.” How are the 
409 


THE PASTOR-PREACHER. 


sheep to be kept safe? Not solely the leading in green 
pastures, but the keeping from the marauder. Not 
simply leading where the streams are calm, the pas¬ 
tures pleasant, and where we in satisfaction lie down 
midst green pastures; but how about the nights and 
the days, how about the fold and the shielding? Here 
is the Shepherd who guards at night, who ‘‘entereth 
by the door,” who is no intruder and no thief, who is 
known to His sheep. 

“The sheep hear His voice: and He calleth His own 
sheep by name, and leadeth them out,” is the entirely 
exquisite reading of Jesus’ poetry. I confess to think¬ 
ing those lines as sweet as anything ever written by 
any poet since this world of poetry began. I have 
pillowed my heartache on them. He knows me and 
loves me and calls me by my name! Truly, He is the 
Good Shepherd. 

Note how the thief is constantly in the mind of 
Jesus. A marauder is near the sheepfold and the pas¬ 
ture. All who have been pastors of the people of 
whom Jesus has His thought, will know how lacking in 
imagery is Jesus’ fear of the thief. A good man is 
begirt by danger. The thief is near. The devil is 
not a myth. The thief lurks and lunges in the dark 
and frays the soul. Jesus had no hypothetical dangers 
against which He is guarding His sheep. He knows 
these hills and valleys, these days and darks, and is 
afraid for the sheep. 

“The good Shepherd giveth His life for the sheep.” 
That vicarious Shepherd is far past any dream of the 
poet of the Shepherd Psalm. In Christ’s psalm there 
410 


CHRIST THE GOOD PASTOR. 


is a cross; and in the poet’s psalm there are a rod 
and a staff for comfort. The Shepherd with the blood 
on His hands ar'd tHe danger to Himself and the fight 
with the thief and the anguish and the faithfulness 
untouched with fear—here that is. The Shepherd to 
die for the sheep—that is the crown of Jesus’ shepherd¬ 
ing. 

I hear that, and I put my hands before my face 
and weep. The Shepherd who loves me will die for 
me! Then am I safe indeed. By dying He leads me 
past death and the grave. “I am come that they might 
have life and that they might have it more abundantly.” 
What think you, soul, of poetry like this.^ Christ’s 
crozier is a cross. There hath been battle; and the 
fight was hard; and the Shepherd hath tasted death 
for the sheep that the sheep may die no more. They 
are coming to the sheepfold where Shepherd and sheep 
alike shall die no more. He marches past our door, 
the Shepherd with the cross! 


411 


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